The Pennsylvania State University

The Graduate School

College of the Liberal Arts

THE STUDENTS OF HUMAN RIGHTS: LITERATURE,

PEDAGOGY, AND THE LONG SIXTIES IN THE AMERICAS

A Dissertation in

Comparative Literature

by

Molly Appel

© 2018 Molly Appel

Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

August 2018 ii

The dissertation of Molly Appel was reviewed and approved* by the following:

Rosemary Jolly Weiss Chair of the Humanities in Literature and Human Rights Dissertation Advisor Chair of Committee

Thomas O. Beebee Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Comparative Literature and German

Charlotte Eubanks Associate Professor of Comparative Literature, Japanese, and Asian Studies Director of Graduate Studies

John Ochoa Associate Professor of Spanish and Comparative Literature

Sarah J. Townsend Assistant Professor of Spanish and Portuguese

Robert R. Edwards Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of English and Comparative Literature Head of the Department of Comparative Literature

*Signatures are on file in the Graduate School.

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ABSTRACT

In The Students of Human Rights, I propose that the role of the cultural figure of the American student activist of the Long Sixties in human rights literature enables us to identify a pedagogy of deficit and indebtedness at work within human rights discourse.

My central argument is that a close and comparative reading of the role of this cultural figure in the American context, anchored in three representative cases from Argentina—a dictatorship, Mexico—a nominal democracy, and Puerto Rico—a colonially-occupied and minoritized community within the United States, reveals that the liberal idealization of the subject of human rights relies upon the implicit pedagogical regulation of an educable subject of human rights. I further argue that decolonial and feminist artists have turned to cultural work as a praxis of re-mapping and re-imagining the terms of liberal educability, and in doing so have created their own aesthetic pedagogies of human rights.

I proceed by examining four cultural texts of distinct media that feature this Long

Sixties student. In my first chapter on Argentina, I analyze the role of willful learning

Alicia Partnoy’s testimonial narrative, The Little School (1986; trans. La Escuelita, 2006) and the film La historia oficial (1985; trans. The Official Story, dir. Luis Puenzo). In the second chapter on Mexico, I re-examine the canon of Tlatelolco memorial literature by way of Roberto Bolaño’s novella Amuleto (1999; trans. Amulet). In my final chapter on

Puerto Rico and its New York City diaspora, I read Pedro Pietri’s poetry collection

Puerto Rican Obituary (1971) alongside documents from his contemporaneous involvement with the radical teaching organization, the Teachers and Writers

Collaborative. I draw from pedagogical and feminist theorists including Sara Ahmed, iv

Paulo Freire, Gloria Anzaldúa, and bell hooks in order to show how these works of literature model and make space for non-co-optable resilience within the colonial legacy of dehumanizing and passively-oriented pedagogy.

By comparatively juxtaposing these three regionally, historically, and culturally emblematic cases of human rights cultural pedagogy, I illustrate the impact that these students of the Long Sixties in the Americas—more effectively and inclusively recognized as learners, both within and without institutions—have had on human rights cultural discourses through the counter-hegemonic pedagogical paradigms they both enacted and inspired. Through these cases, scholars can develop a more robust lexicon for identifying the specific form of educability upon which the liberal subject of human rights relies. In turn, scholars and educators can better recognize how alternative claims to educability resist and revise a liberal framework of human rights recognition that enables racialized state capitalism.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

List of Figures...... vi

Machete (Preface)...... vii

Acknowledgements...... xiii

Introduction The Ayotzinapa 43…...... 1 The Legacy of the Long Sixties in the Americas...... 9 Literature and the Educable Subjects of Human Rights...... 15

Chapter 1. “A WHIRLWIND AND, PERHAPS, A SEEDBED”: THE AESTHETICS OF WILLFUL LEARNING IN POST-PROCESO ARGENTINA “Que los lápices sigan escribiendo”……………………………………... 37 The Bad Students of the Long Sixties in Argentina...... 53 Learning in and with The Little School...... 67 The Lessons of La historia oficial...... 88 Staying Willful...... 107

Chapter 2. PALIMPSESTIC PEDAGOGY: ROBERTO BOLAÑO AND THE MEXICAN AMULET OF HUMAN RIGHTS Traces and Tracings...... 112 The Pedagogy of Tlatelolco Remembrance...... 117 Myth and Masculinity...... 127 Auxilio Lacouture: The New Mestiza...... 141 Auxilio for the Pedagogy of Witness...... 171

Chapter 3. WRITING OUT OF THE OBITUARY: PUERTO RICAN INDEBTEDNESS AND POETIC LEARNING On Tatas and Teachings...... 175 Between Puerto Rican “Self-Determination” and Human Rights...... 183 A Cultural Pedagogy of Indebtedness...... 192 Poetic Learning Against Becoming “Blind in the Mind”...... 110 The Ethics of Accountability...... 223

Conclusion An Aesthetic Curriculum for Willful Learning...... 226

Works Cited...... 242

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LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 0-1: “Text as Matter, Concept, and Action.” Page 39………………….. 32 Figure 1-1: “Que los lápices sigan escribiendo.” Photo taken by the author; March 24, 2016...... 41 Figure 1-2: Observing the torture. Author’s screenshot...... 95 Figure 1-3: A song under the rain. Author’s screenshot...... 99 Figure 1-4: Singing the anthem. Author’s screenshot...... 100 Figure 1-5: Slamming the citation. Author’s screenshot...... 101 Figure 1-6: Graded. Author’s screenshot...... 104 Figure 1-7: Ana (on the left) tells her story to Alicia (on the right). Still from Internet Movie Database’s page, “The Official Story”………………………..... 105 Figure 1-8: The sights and sounds of female students playing fill in the gaps between Alicia and Sara. Author’s screenshot...... 106 Figure 2-1: Plaza de las tres culturas. Photo taken by the author, April 8, 2017...... 112 Figure 2-2: "Ni perdon, ni olvido." Photo taken by the author, April 8, 2017…. 115 Figure 2-3: Birth of the Mestizo Nation. Photo taken by the author, April 8, 2017 ...... 152 Figure 2-4: Example of student poster that includes the book trope. Scanned from Imágenes y símbolos del 68...... 167 Figure 2-5: Example of student protest poster with dove image. Scanned from Imágenes y símbolos del 68…………………………………………………….. 168 Figure 3-1: Student Drawing. Box 69, Folder 9, Series VI: Subject Files. The Pedro Pietri Papers, Archives of Puerto Rican Diaspora. Author’s scan of photocopy made by the Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños...... 220 Figure 3-2: Figure 2: Student Drawing. Box 69, Folder 9, Series VI: Subject Files. The Pedro Pietri Papers, Archives of Puerto Rican Diaspora. Author’s scan of photocopy made by the Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños...... 222 vii

MACHETE

(PREFACE)

As I was taking a break from writing my lofty draft of a dissertation prospectus on human rights and literature, an article posted by my former student on Facebook pulled me back into what felt like a past life. Five and a half years earlier, Boubacar had walked into my high school classroom and insisted that I allow him to join my English Language

Arts (ELA) Regents Exam intensive preparatory class. He was among the top academically performing seniors in his class, but the ELA exam had always been a challenge because he had only begun to develop his knowledge of academic English after he and his family arrived in the United States, when he entered middle school. His score belied his abilities and his potential. He was ready to give up the social motivation and validation of an environment of his friends and academic peers in order to learn to read and write about literature in a way that was recognized by the state of New York.

I, of course, wanted that official recognition for him, too. But I was also his young, white teacher in an urban school full of students of color. I was a familiar trope: committed, well-intentioned, but largely ignorant of how my successes in the education system and the violence that system inflicted upon my students were deeply connected.

Boubacar joined my motley crew of African and Latina/o/x English-language learners and African-American students, all of whom had been repeatedly trampled upon and exponentially failed by the public education system. The stakes were high for my students: they had to learn to read literature in a way that made them recognizable as successfully incorporated citizens, according to the metrics of the New York State Board viii of Regents. Only in this way could they earn the credential of a high school diploma, which was a gateway toward a modicum of economic stability and opportunity as they continued in their young adulthood.1 Years later, in the thick of graduate study, I could begin to articulate the exam for what it was: the latest iteration of a racialized and violent pedagogical system that has its roots in colonialism and imperialism. The exam taught these students to think of themselves as deficient and was part of a long trajectory of systemic and racialized oppression. In attempting to lead them out of that trajectory, I had to teach them to read literature in a way that would enable them to pass that test; yet in doing so, I had to first participate in coding them as deficient. I created a literature class built on what would best be described as “damage-control” (or “damage-inducing”) pedagogy. I did my best to teach my students to perform as a very specific type of learner of literature.

My memory of that class, and of those students, overwhelmed me as I read the article Boubacar had posted. It was a work of long-form journalism published in New

York Magazine, titled simply “Machete.” It recounted the tragedy of a teenager Boubacar had known named Mohamed Jalloh. “Machete” follows the Jalloh family’s escape from the civil war in Sierra Leone, when Mohamed was three years old, to Mohamed’s life in the South Bronx within a close-knit Fulani community, to his murder in front of a 99-cent

1 While studies based on the most recent U.S. census data (2009) show that the most significant difference in earnings potential is between high school graduates and those who earn bachelor’s degrees, there remains a notable difference between those with and without high school diplomas (“Education and Lifetime Earnings”; “Lifetime Earnings by Education Level”; Tamborini, Kim, and Sakamoto). These statistics come with significant gender and racial discrepancies: A woman must have a Ph.D. to earn as much as a man with a B.A., and the gap in earnings potential between whites and African Americans, Latinos, Asian Americans, Native Americans, and Pacific Islanders is widest at the lowest levels of educational attainment (Canevale, Rose, and Cheah 10-13; “By the Numbers: Lifetime Earning and Higher Education”). ix store in upper Manhattan. The title emphasizes the convergence of the violence from which his family fled to the violence in which they landed; Mohamed was killed by a machete—the weapon of choice for both Revolutionary United Front rebels and the

Washington Heights street gang that corned him. The narrative stitches the violence of the rebels together with the xenophobic and systemic violence Mohamed and his brothers experienced while growing up in the Bronx. Gonnerman ends the piece with the moral didacticism and darkness of a children’s fairy tale: “Here is the story of a young man who survived Sierra Leone’s civil war, who fled the country atop his father’s shoulders, who made it all the way to New York, only to confront the same fate he’d so narrowly escaped as a boy.”

“Machete” seems to be a classic case of what Elizabeth Anker calls a “human rights bestseller,” a narrative that reifies victimization and colonial mindsets by deploying the tropes of sentimental literature (35). Gonnerman’s prose is striking in the way it remains closely and chronologically focused on the Jallohs, without providing any commentary. Any context she provides about the civil war in Sierra Leone or life for

Fulani immigrants in the South Bronx is directed at enriching the reader’s understanding of the Jalloh’s family dynamics. She recounts Mohamed’s personality and daily struggles through the voices of his family, classmates, and cousins. In some ways Gonnerman’s prose reminds me of the polyvocal framework of a testimonio, told by a subaltern narrator to an “intellectual” as a bridge to a so-called “First World” audience. As with a testimonio, the article in New York Magazine is, as Howard Kurtz has described, “not x exactly aimed at schoolteachers in Queens”;2 that is to say, the audience consists of predominantly white, affluent readers who are accustomed to encountering such narratives and the people within them in strictly compartmentalized and distanced ways.

Gonnerman’s prose fits into these compartments even as it suggests that she wants to use these tropes in order to close some of those distances. There is no triumph in Mohamed’s individualized self-fulfillment; Western ideals do not rescue Mohamed’s family from an aberrant and faraway violence. Make no mistake: Gonnerman does present Mohamed as a young man on the road to successful integration and self-realization. This characterization makes the tragedy of his death stark for the readership of New York

Magazine by eliciting a distanced pity for stereotypes of the immigrant, the African, and the poor urban family. What it also reveals, however, is how the failures and betrayals of the Western ideals of self-realization operate not only across the wide expanse of the

Atlantic, but also in the very front yards, so to speak, of the New York Magazine readership.

Gonnerman’s quiet condemnation is underscored by her focus on Mohamed’s development as a student and the challenges that he and other Fulani young men face in school. It is here that she briefly, but crucially, diverts from her reliance on a traditional

Bildungsroman narrative of Western integration and development. She documents a gathering that might seem invisible to passersby, who would only see “a bunch of kids joking around, slap-boxing, knocking each other’s baseball hats off” (Gonnerman). These gatherings were the meetings of what Fulani students called the African Family United

2 According to megamediamarketing.com, in 2008 the median annual income of New York Magazine readers was almost $71,000 (“demographics”). xi

(AFU). She writes, “A group of Fulani teens had started AFU in 2006, and the idea behind it is a sort of reverse peer pressure: If you spend your Friday nights with other

Fulani kids—and you encourage one another not to give up on school—you’ll be better off.” She notes that members of this student-formed support group “are enrolled in

SUNY-Albany, John Jay, Brooklyn College, and elsewhere.” Though Gonnerman codes the efficacy of these gatherings in terms recognizable to white readers—the validation of the academy—she makes narrative space for a strategy of educational resilience3 that would be rendered unrecognizable under the metrics of the Board of Regents and unrecognizable within a human rights bestseller.

When I finished reading “Machete,” I was overwhelmed by the tapestry it wove between my past life and my current academic life. I thought of the students of color I had known during my short tenure in the Bronx who had been killed by gun violence, while their surviving friends diligently carried on taking their Regents Exams in the midst of that loss and trauma. I thought of the women in my class from Côte d'Ivoire and Ghana who had taken the ELA exam four times, and were so failed by the system—so failed by me—that they still did not pass the exam after completing my class and thus could not graduate. Their stories reified, once again, the violent pedagogies of slavery that are alive and well in the U.S. education system; they likewise foregrounded the disciplinary metrics embedded in how we think about reading and readers of literature. And then there was Boubacar, whom, at the end of our semester together, I had the great privilege of

3 I want to distinguish my usage of the term “resilience,” here and throughout this dissertation, from a colonial and racial capitalist notion of resilience, which attributes resilience to impoverished and subjugated communities as a means of naturalizing violence and deflecting responsibility for addressing social problems. I use “resilience” to indicate a holistic mode of learning that persistently cultivates non- hegemonic and non-binary epistemologies, ones that cannot be co-opted by the tools of white, heteronormative supremacy. xii telling that he had improved his Regents exam score by 20 points and would earn the recognition of a full Regents diploma. He would go on to thrive in college, and later, to become a school counselor, adding official credentials to his own gift for “reverse peer pressure.” He would then drop “Machete” into my life, which, like the exam he took all those years ago, captured the knife’s edge on which pedagogy and literacy—literary literacy—determined whether these students’ humanity was either validated or discarded.

In some ways, this dissertation can be boiled down my need to grapple with everything in that moment of crossing. How, why, and when are Boubacar and Mohamed discernable as subjects of human rights under the deeply racist structures of U.S. public education? What material impacts, and complicities, do the stories and the pedagogies we build around human rights have on their lives? Though what follows does not depart from the familiar generic norms of an academic dissertation about literature, the young men and women I knew in the Bronx are never out of its sights. It is from them, and toward them, that the work of this project departs and returns.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Let it first be acknowledged that this dissertation has been forged through my efforts to write my way out of my father’s obituary. This effort, and everything that came before it, was sustained by my family. My thanks go to my inspiring, trailblazing aunties and cousins—Carol, Viv, Diane, Nancy, Rachel, Sarah, Nora, and Michael. Linda is a blessing for everyone who gets to have her in their lives, but I have the special fortune of calling her my “Mom Two.” And as for my “birth” mama, Diana, I’m lucky to be able to call her my best friend.

The mentorship of my committee members made this project come to life. Tom

Beebee, Sarah Townsend, John Ochoa, and Charlotte Eubanks helped me hone my ideas and my prose; they have been outstanding professional models. Rosemary Jolly’s advising helped me truly find my voice and situate myself as a scholar. Bob Edwards and

Carey Eckhardt provided unflagging encouragement and support. The financial support of Penn State’s Center for Global Studies4, College of the Liberal Arts, Rock Ethics

Institute, and Crawford Family Fellowship enabled me to work with the generous staff of the Centro de Estudios Legales y Sociales and the Ex-ESMA memorial park in Buenos

Aires, the Centro Cultural Universitario de Tlatelolco in Mexico City, and the Hunter

College Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños in East Harlem.

I’ve been lucky to be part of a graduate student comunidad that has provided all manner of crucial “chaotic goods” during the rigor of graduate school. Alex Fyfe

4 This material is based upon work supported by the U.S. Department of Education under Award No. P015A100062. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this publication are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the U.S. Department of Education. xiv deserves a particular shout-out for being a considerate colleague, a steadfast friend, and a forgiving attendee of four Appel family Thanksgivings. Danica Savonic inspired and encouraged me with her scholarship, pedagogy, and generosity. The community of 2018

MLA Connected Academics Fellows helped me get excited about the broader impacts of our work in the humanities. I’m also grateful for the support of Stephanie Bora, Sean

Bodley, Dorn Hetzel, Gabeba Baderoon, Heather Scott, and for my assiduous editor,

Stephanie Scott. The mentorship and friendship of my Skidmore College undergraduate professors Michael Arnush, Leslie Mechem, and Phyllis Roth (1945-2012) set a high bar for my own asiprations as a scholar and educator. My beloved friends from my Teach for

America days—Mr. Patterson, Ms. Palmer, Ms. Berlanga, and Ms. Cartwright-Punnett— have been highly necessary foils to academia throughout these years of graduate school, as well as reminders of why I pursued this project.

Finally, my love and gratitude go to four boys. “Cat Oliver Dooley” has been part of my family for 14 years and is my dearest writing companion. My brother, Ben, is the

Luke to my Leia, the Sokka to my Katara, my oldest friend and best harmonizer.

Throughout these challenging years, he helped me remember my core. My favorite laughing and sparring partner, my Matthew, has been thousands of miles away from me for most of this dissertation’s journey. I hope that our life together opens at its close. Rick

Appel (1940-2015) was my most devoted fan, thought partner, and fellow traveler. This project is dedicated to your loving and hungry spirit, Papi.

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¡Que vivan los estudiantes, jardín de las alegrías! Son aves que no se asustan de animal ni policía, y no le asustan las balas ni el ladrar de la jauría. Caramba y zamba la cosa, ¡que viva la astronomía!

[. . .]

Me gustan los estudiantes porque levantan el pecho cuando le dicen harina sabiéndose que es afrecho, y no hacen el sordomudo cuando se presenta el hecho. Caramba y zamba la cosa ¡el código del derecho!

-Violeta Parra 1

INTRODUCTION

“The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just.” -Martin Luther King, Jr., as quoted by Grace Lee Boggs “The fabulous thing about words is that they allow us to create images of the potential.” -Johan Galtung

THE AYOTZINAPA 43

In a rural pocket of Guerrero, Mexico, the Escuela Normal Rural Raúl Isidro

Burgos, a teacher-training college, better known as Ayotzinapa, serves local young people seeking to develop their community through learning and progressive education.

The all-male student body comes exclusively from indigenous and peasant families in the area. Students at Ayotzinapa learn, in part, by organizing and contributing to the broader social and labor-oriented causes of their community. The school is known for its history of left-wing political activism and alignment with communist revolutionary principles.

The Mexican government capitalizes on the stigmatization of these alignments to paint the students of this school as troublemakers and terrorists, belying the ultimate priority of the school’s work: to combat national policies and practices that imagine indigenous and peasant communities as inherently backward and dangerous (Mora 67).

On September 14th 2014, the students of Ayotzinapa were on their way to a demonstration in remembrance of one of the most devastating events in Mexico’s recent history: the Tlatelolco massacre, which occurred on the eve of the 1968 Olympic Games in Mexico City. At Tlatelolco, hundreds of unarmed students were assassinated and

2 disappeared by the state and state-sanctioned paramilitary groups.5 In the town of Igualá, the Ayotzinapa students encountered a similar fate; their busses were stopped by police, who immediately began shooting at them. At the end of the evening’s escalating violence, forty-three students were loaded onto the beds of departing police patrol cars; they remain unaccounted for at the time of this writing.6

The diligent work of surviving classmates, friends, and family calling for the return of their loved ones (and an accurate account of what happened to them) has caused the event and disappearances to garner global attention. Whether touring town halls and college campuses in the United States or organizing local meetings at the peril of identifying themselves to the narcoestado,7 those who commemorate and advocate for the forty-three students maintain a disciplined willfulness toward the state’s efforts to foreclose further public examination of the case by perpetuating false and damaging narratives of these missing students. Above all, they are combatting the state’s classification of these students as, to use Zygmunt Bauman’s phrasing, “wasted” and

“disposable” lives.8 Each year, on the anniversary of the disappearances, Ayotzinapa- solidarity demonstrations occur in countries that have their own histories with this kind of violence, including Argentina and the United States. People gather at Mexico City’s

5 I discuss this event in depth in chapter two. 6 The ongoing investigation into the students’ whereabouts has been convoluted, thanks to the corruption and dissembling tactics of the Mexican government. One development uncovered the involvement of the Igualá mayor and his wife, as well as the cartel with which she was associated. Mass graves were discovered by volunteers in Guerrero, but none of the students were present. The renowned Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team has been working on the case. Their findings summarily contradict the state’s insistence that the students were handed over by the police to the Guerreros Unidos cartel, who supposedly executed then incinerated their bodies in a garbage dump. Their interactive digital Forensic Archeology Project, the Plataforma Ayotzinapa continues to map and excavate narratives of what occurred. It can be accessed at http://www.plataforma-ayotzinapa.org. 7 The term “narcoestado”, “narco-state,” is a neologism used to indicate the `entanglement of state institutions with the power and wealth of drug trafficking networks. 8 See Bauman (2013).

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Tlatelolco Plaza as a way of emphasizing that history has repeated itself: in a nominal democracy, the criminalization and disappearance of student activists that occurred during the height of the Long Sixties and into the Cold War era of Latin American dictatorships continues today, in plain sight.

Out of the events, investigations, and commemoration of Ayotzinapa, a number of key elements shaping contemporary discourses on human rights in the Americas converge. Ayotzinapa illustrates the legacy of the Long Sixties in contemporary racial capitalist and neoliberal violence in the Americas. Student activists of the Long Sixties aligned themselves with and contributed to decolonial liberation movements occurring throughout the “Third World,” what today we call the Global South. In demanding a transformation of long-held social structures and economic policies based in liberal idealism, they became both the symbol of possibility and of danger. The students of the

Long Sixties would continue to loom large in the American cultural imaginary even as the economic theory of neoliberalism became state ideology.9 This transition began during the Long Sixties in nations across Latin America and took hold across the hemisphere throughout the 1980s and 1990s. The dictatorships that emerged in response

9 A few comments on the terminology used here and throughout this dissertation: my usage of the term “American” refers to the hemisphere, not just to the United States as is the common rhetorical misapplication. If I am referring specifically to the United States as part of an adjectival phrase, I use the more specific and accurate Spanish term estadounidense, which translates roughly to “United States-ian” when appropriate. I use the term neoliberalism in reference to its particular development in the context of the Americas, where neoliberal policies and practices were workshopped in the 1970s. I do so while recognizing that neoliberalism is an evolution of colonial ideologies that devalue racialized, sexualized, and gendered lives outside of white heteronormativity. I also use the term while recognizing that the state itself, in its foundation, is a colonial construction. For more on the development of the term neoliberalism within the Americas, see Naomi Klein (2010); Henry Giroux (2011); David Harvey (2007).

4 to the Long Sixties decimated labor unions and other social structures championed by these student figures; their policies would pave the way for modern neoliberal reforms.10

As a modern state dominated by neoliberalism, the Mexican government enacts policies and practices that make permissible the state-sanctioned deaths of subjects deemed “disposable,” like the Ayotzinapa students. Human rights discourse evolved alongside these political developments, catalyzing during the Long Sixties and developing throughout the investigations and memorializations of the state-enacted atrocities in the decades that followed. The attention given to Ayotzinapa from human rights organizations, like Amnesty International, makes the student disappearances easily recognizable to global audience as a human rights violation.11 This attention, however, has failed to fully account for what Ayotzinapa most powerfully illustrates about human rights: the pedagogical framework of cultural and economic deficit that shapes both the violence of these events and their commemoration.

The importance of this pedagogical framework to human rights discourse becomes clear when we connect Ayotzinapa to other contemporaneous student action in response to the neoliberal devaluation of life and racial capitalism across the Americas.12

For example, in 2006, and again in 2011, Chilean high school and university students organized families, teachers, and union members across the country to propose and

10 See Naomi Klein (2010), Paul W. Drake (1996), and María Lorena Cook (2002). 11 See their coverage at https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2015/09/the-ayotzinapa-stories-one-year- on/. 12 For the origin of the term “racial capitalism,” see Cedric Robinson’s Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. For further elaboration, see Jodi Melamed’s Represent and Destroy: Rationalizing Violence in the New Racial Capitalism.

5 demand change to the Pinochet-era education system and its effects on Chilean society.13

These policies created entrenched social inequities by privatizing and commodifying schools and educational access. Participants who galvanized public opinion through performative acts of resistance, including tomas (sit-ins) and burning debt-promissory notes, were met with police violence and repression.14 Another important instance occurred in 2017, when striking students shut down the renowned, 114-year old

University of Puerto Rico for over two months. Puerto Rico’s debt crisis had cascaded into massive cuts to the university’s funding. The university responded to these austerity measures by dramatically raising student tuition, leading to, as one student leader effectively stated, tuition hikes that “are not to improve, they are to impoverish” (Robles).

When considered alongside these instances of student action that respond to the same structural conditions of violence that erupted in Mexico and garnered global attention, Ayotzinapa highlights how the violence against which the concept of human rights claims to stand operates through an educational framework of cultural deficiency and economic indebtedness. Most importantly, Ayotzinapa illustrates the symbolic, performative, and historical role of students—and, more inclusively, of the non- institutional learners who commemorate them—in excavating and developing counter- hegemonic, alternative pedagogies of human rights. My purpose here is to examine how cultural work across the Americas situate these student figures while participating in, enabling, or helping to dismantle these pedagogies of human rights.

13 In 1973, Augusto Pinochet led a U.S.-backed coup that overthrew the democratically-elected president of Chile, Salvador Allende. He was the dictator of Chile until 1990. During that time he implemented the neoliberal policies of the Chicago Boys, Chilean economists who trained under Milton Freidman. 14 See Cristian Cabalin (2012), Óscar Aguilera Ruix (2016), Alicia del Campo (2016), and the Radio Amulante podcast episode, “¡No pagaré!” (“I won’t pay!”; 2017). [ZOTERO]

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In what follows, I propose that the role of the cultural figure of the American student activist of the Long Sixties in human rights literature enables us to identify a pedagogy of deficit and indebtedness at work within human rights discourse. The Long

Sixties represents a crucial temporal window for understanding human rights discourse in the Americas. On the one hand, the era is preceded by and propeled the energies and imperatives of the decolonization movements across the Global South, as well as feminist and racially minoritized liberation movements within the nominal West; on the other hand, the era is foreclosed upon by the increasing privatization of educational systems throughout the late twentieth century that continue to respond to them. It is no coincidence that during this period, Paulo Freire published his pivotal work, Pedagogia do Oprimido (1968; trans. Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 1970), in which he articulates this capital-driven mode of education as “the banking method.” In a “banking” scenario, teachers authoritatively deposit knowledge into passive students as if they were empty vessels in need of filling (Pedagogy 79). Students enter into a banking education from a position of deficit, and learning is considered to have occurred if students demonstrate successful consumption. My central argument is that a close and comparative reading of the role of this cultural figure in the American context, anchored in three representative cases from Argentina—a dictatorship, Mexico—a nominal democracy, and Puerto

Rico—a colonially-occupied and minoritized community within the United States, reveals that human rights discourse is predicated on this banking pedagogical model.

I proceed by examining four cultural texts of distinct media that feature this Long

Sixties student. In order to trace the role of this student figure throughout the decades of their legacy, I have chosen four texts from different historical and memorial contexts that

7 are all tethered to the formative era of Long Sixties. In my first chapter on Argentina, I examine Alicia Partnoy’s testimonial narrative, The Little School (1986; trans. La

Escuelita, 2006) and the film La historia oficial (1985; trans. The Official Story, dir. Luis

Puenzo). In the second chapter on Mexico, I re-examine the canon of Tlatelolco memorial literature by way of Roberto Bolaño’s novella Amuleto (1999; trans. Amulet).

In my final chapter on Puerto Rico and its New York City diaspora, I read Pedro Pietri’s poetry collection Puerto Rican Obituary (1971) alongside documents from his contemporaneous involvement with the radical teaching organization, the Teachers and

Writers Collaborative. By comparatively juxtaposing these three regionally, historically, and culturally emblematic cases of human rights cultural pedagogy, I illustrate the impact that these students of the Long Sixties in the Americas—more effectively and inclusively recognized as learners, both within and without institutions—have had on human rights cultural discourses through the counter-hegemonic pedagogical paradigms they both enacted and inspired. When comparatively juxtaposed, these cultural works reveal how pedagogical relations have played a much larger role, as both a conceptual and tangible framework for human rights, than studies of state, neoliberal, structural violence in the

Americas would suggest.

My approach emphasizes that the human rights violations memorialized in these texts operate beyond individual or regional pathologies; like the pedagogies they reveal and engender, they occur in a global context, and are co-constitutive with the structures of racialized, neoliberal capitalism that developed within and across the Americas. These cases from the Americas have implications for the study of the intersections of human rights and literature more broadly because they demonstrate that Enlightenment-based,

8 human rights discourse and neoliberal and racial capitalist violence share a banking pedagogy. In other words, these cases enable us to examine how the liberal idealization of the subject of human rights relies upon the implicit, deficit-based pedagogical regulation of an educable subject of human rights. In turn, they demonstrate how decolonial and feminist artists have turned to cultural work as a praxis of re-mapping and re-imagining these terms of liberal educability. Ultimately, I propose that these counter- hegemonic modes of learning and teaching occurring within and through aesthetic media are critical to understanding how human rights discourse has developed and continues to operate.

In order to emphasize the implication of these aesthetic pedagogies for broader studies of human rights and literature, the texts I address in this dissertation are purposefully drawn from bodies of work that are considered to be “canonical” within their respective traditions, be they regional (Southern Cone dictatorships), authorial

(Bolaño or Pietri), or rooted in community identity (Nuyorican, or more broadly, Latinx literature). Examinations of state-based human rights violations in the American context have overlooked how cultural texts that commemorate these violations intervene in the banking pedagogical framework upon which human rights discourses are predicated.

Taken together, the cases I examine suggest that decolonial and feminist pedagogies have had a far more sweeping impact on national and canonical cultural memorialization in the

Americas than is commonly understood. Scholars question whether the notion of “human rights” could ever enable other modes of recognition (and, as I will argue, other

9 educabilities) beyond their foundational liberal exclusions.15 These cases demonstrate how decolonial and feminist pedagogies do so, irrespective of whether or not “human rights” makes space for them.

Finally, I consider the implications of these human rights pedagogies for scholarly practice. I argue that these cases highlight how studies of the intersections of human rights and literature tend to uphold a banking pedagogical framework of human rights.

The authors of the texts I discuss point to the need for critics, activists, and educators to reflect upon how we utilize pedagogical language in our examinations of human rights violence and its representation. They suggest that if we are invested in advancing a praxis of human rights that amends and protects against neoliberal and racial capitalist violence, then it is crucial that we attend to decolonial and feminist pedagogical models of human rights discourse. Through their presence in these texts, the students of the Long Sixties in the Americas foreground how paradigm shifts of learning are essential for ethical, non- appropriative human rights work.

THE LEGACY OF THE LONG SIXTIES IN THE AMERICAS

The students of the Long Sixties were a central part of what has become hemispheric American studies. In aligning themselves with national, ethnic, and labor- oriented liberation movements on a global scale, they established networks of solidarity that had tangible impact across Latin America. In the United States, their activism led to the establishment of academic departments dedicated to minoritized communities. By

15 See, among others, Ian Balfour and Eduardo Cadava (2004), Domna Stanton (2006), Costas Douzinas (2000; 2007), Doris Sommer (2009), Samuel Moyn (2012) and Peter De Bolla (2013).

10 anchoring an examination of human rights discourse on these formative figures, I adopt what John Riofrio describes as “a shifted paradigm of hemispheric latinidad, which emphasizes “the structural nature of US [sic] domination by revealing oppression at work within the United States and throughout the hemisphere” (Riofrio 9). Thus, my study emphasizes latinidad as a paradigm and not as an indicator of a homogenous identity. 16

These pivotal student figures support an understanding of latinidad as a paradigm of hemispheric analysis, one that effectively foregrounds decolonial articulations of educability as an intervention into the structures of violence that are entwined with human rights discourse itself. The decolonial, queer, and feminist methodologies that they helped cultivate across Latina/o/x studies and Latin American studies are crucial for, as Walter Mignolo phrases it, “delinking” human rights pedagogical imaginaries from

Western colonial and neoimperial enclosures (Epistemic Disobedience 45). In turn, by framing the social, intellectual, and aesthetic interventions of Latina/o/x studies within human rights discourses that have predominantly focused on discrete Latin American regions, I highlight the global stakes of Latina/o/x literary interventions beyond the lens of identity politics.17

The figure of the student has been a hemispherically-orienting vector in Latin

American thought since the nineteenth-century independence movements and the era of

16 As Latina/o/x studies scholars have extensively discussed, there are multiple, shifting, and fluid latinidades. See, among others, Aparicio (“Reading the ‘Latino’ in Latino Studies: Toward Re-Imagining Our Academic Location,” 1999), Aparicio and Chávez-Silverman (Tropicalizations: Transcultural Representations of Latinidad, 1997), Chabram-Dernersesian (“Latina/o: Another Site of Struggle, Another Site of Accountability,” 2003), and Sanchez and Pita (“Theses on the Latino Bloc: A Critical Perspective,” 2006). 17 My approach here follows the examples of Latina/o/x studies scholars such as Ana Patricia Rodríguez and Christopher Gonzáles, who advocate for reading Latina/o/x literature “across geographies” and as part of broader, global “discursive circuits” (Rodríguez 125; González 10).

11 post-independence nation formation. Just as Juliet Hooker observes that “mythologies of race were formed in relation to an American other,” notions and metrics of educability across the Americas were also formed within these relations (3). The political and social ideas of Domingo Sarmiento (1811-1888), for example, centered on a hemispherically- conceived notion of educable subjectivity. Sarmiento’s Civilización y barbarie: vida de

Juan Facundo Quiroga (The Life of Facundo Quiroga: Civilization and Barbarism,

1845) is a foundational work of Latin American literature. He wrote it while in exile in

Chile as a condemnation of the dictatorship of Juan Manuel de Rosas (1835-1852). In

Facundo, he stages Argentine history in a style that would come to define Latin

American romanticism: as a conflict between “civilization” and “barbarism.” He situates

“barbarism” in the gaucho, African, and indigenous uneducated publics that he believes brought Rosas into power, and he sees “civilization” through the models of Europe and

North America. Like those of other Latin American intellectuals of the post- independence era, Sarmiento’s views were influenced by Western Enlightenment thinkers, such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, as well as, in his case, by the ideas of the estadounidense educator Horace Mann.18

While he championed the right and ability of all people to become educated,

Sarmiento fundamentally mistrusted this “uneducated” public. Like the idealized liberal subject of human rights, his conception of educability was forged through metrics of intelligence that positioned people of color and marginalized communities as inherently

18 These influences are apparent in his writings on education. The first was his treatise on education in Chile, De la educación popular (On Popular Education, 1849), which he wrote while he was in exile from the Rosas dictatorship; he would further develop his ideas in relation to his visits to the United States and the writings of Horace Mann in Memoria sobre educación común (Report on Communal Education, 1856) and Las escuelas—base de la prosperidad y de la república en los Estados Unidos (Schools—the Foundations of Prosperity and the Republic in the United States, 1866).

12 and naturally uneducated.19 More specifically, his vision of popular education was shaped by his visits to the United States during the Civil War and Reconstruction. Juliet Hooker observes that Sarmiento mapped the framework of civilization and barbarity onto

Argentina’s history and social context vis-á-vis the U.S. racial politics of the Civil War— with the North representing civilization and the South, barbarity (100). Most notably,

Sarmiento’s evolving notions of Latin American “civilization and barbarism” were formed in the midst of his engagement with Reconstruction-era ideas about race and eugenics, which were based on aesthetic judgements about black and indigenous peoples and ascribed intellectual and moral traits to these aesthetic indicators (75).20 The educational developments during Reconstruction, broadly aimed at educating newly freed blacks and poor whites, embedded the racism of slavery into the metrics of pedagogical practice. Sarmiento similarly insisted that common education for the “barbaric” population be made widely available, even to a disciplinary extreme, asserting that “[t]he jails, the penitentiary ought to be schools” (Memoria 155, as qtd. in Stewart and French

25).

19 Sarmiento also corresponded regularly with Horace Mann’s wife, the educator and abolitionist Mary Mann (she was the first to translate Facundo and some of his other writings). Hooker observes that Sarmiento’s mistrust of an uneducated public led to a fundamental disagreement between them on the question of literacy requirements for black suffrage; Sarmiento was in favor of them and Mann was staunchly against them (99). It is important to note that Sarmiento viewed the situation of black Americans as analogous to the white gauchos of Argentina. 20 The popularity of eugenics in the United States during the nineteenth century was also foundational to the educational norms that still dominate pedagogical structures in U.S. education (K-16) to this day. Statistician Frances Galton, who was a founding eugenicist, introduced statistical models of standard deviation and the notion of a “bell curve” distribution into education metrics that were adopted in the United States; these nineteenth-century metrics still characterize assessment and instructional design today (Davidson, The New Education 202). His ways of measuring and distributing intelligence into a “quotient” (what we know as an I.Q.), were in service of scientifically legitimizing the dehumanization of people of color.

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A century later, the ideas about educability shaping Sarmiento’s policies would persist in a new form. With the arrival of the Long Sixties in Latin America, and the subsequent decades of repressive dictatorships, the figure of the student shifted from being a hopeful vector for the aesthetic and social processes of nation-formation to one of loss, sacrifice, and victimhood. At the same, with new urgency, literature in the Long

Sixties became a place that disturbed the presented world and a means of processing events and ideas that “could not be processed within the paradigm of modernity” (Franco

217). The Latin American “Boom” writers, including Gabriel García Márquez, Julio

Cortázar, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Juan Rulfo, became global ambassadors (often both metaphorically and professionally) for Latin American culture even while, in their literary writing, they showed “el desgaste total de la concepción liberal de la historia”

(“the total erosion of the liberal conception of history”; Vidal 235). Hernán Vidal argues that the hermeneutic of human rights came to dominate cultural discourse throughout these decades of dictatorship and recovery, and that literary and cultural work made crucial contributions to its articulation (225). Nevertheless, while literary studies of Latin

American and Latina/o/x communities have further developed this hemispheric paradigm since the Long Sixties, scholarship on human rights in Latin America tends to remain nationally or regionally focused (the Southern Cone, Central America, etc.). Furthermore, it continues to be dominated by a sense of crisis and loss, proceeding with what Doris

Sommer calls “a distinctly pessimistic accent” (“Human Rights and Responsibilities”

140).21

21 See Jean Franco’s The Decline and Fall of the Lettered City (2002), Idelber Avelar’s The Untimely Present: Postdictatorial Latin American fiction and the Task of Mourning (1999), and Nelly Richard’s La insubordinación de los signos (1994; trans. The Insubordination of Signs).

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I interpret these trends as evidence of an ongoing frustration with the legacy of liberal human rights discourse and its shared epistemologies with Western coloniality and modernity (Mignolo, “Epistemic Disobedience” 45-46). Latin American post-dictatorial nations have had to contend with human rights abuses from within the paradigm of

Western hegemonic power that fueled those abuses. Thus, the contentious “returns to democracy” and memorialization of human rights atrocities during dictatorships became models for how discourses of human rights can easily become appropriated away from their specific contexts to serve neoliberal and hegemonic interests, rather than acting as watchwords for protecting the oppressed or for memorializing victims. As Fernando

Rosenberg assesses, “Human rights and neoliberal commonsense share common ground that neither exhausts the emancipatory possibilities of human rights nor exempts neoliberal politics of blatantly ignoring basic rights” (1). The challenge for scholars has been to resist this appropriation by deeply contextualizing discourse on human rights violations without reifying the way in which such discourse can render invisible the narrations of those who are not white, heteronormative males. This struggle reflects the legacy of the colonial encounter itself, of locating the origin of human rights writing with colonial Spanish-language intellectuals writing about the native population as victims

(McClennen 108). My contention is that focusing on the pedagogical framework of analysis invited by these student figures of the Long Sixties from across the Americas enables us to highlight how decolonial and feminist knowledge and literary praxis shape national narratives of human rights: by both avoiding and countering the underlying banking pedagogy that enables such appropriation.

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LITERATURE AND THE EDUCABLE SUBJECTS OF HUMAN RIGHTS

Before introducing my cases in more detail, I want to elaborate on how my argument about the figure of the Long Sixties student, and the pedagogies these

American authors and artists build around that figure, enters the sphere of human rights and literary scholarship more broadly. Throughout this dissertation, I will discuss a number of registers of the student—what I refer to more broadly as the learner or

“educable subject”—in relation to the subject of human rights. In using the term

“educable subject”, I refer to the implicit designation and recognition of a person’s ability to be educated; educability is the condition of having particular qualities—spoken or unspoken—that demonstrate a capacity for what is imagined to be, or coded as, learning.

I contend that this concept is embedded in the notion of the liberal subject: to be a subject of human rights in liberal humanist discourse is also to be educable in a very particular way. Within predominant legal and humanist discourses, to be a subject of human rights is to be an educable subject, discernable by the metrics of liberalism. In turn, the liberal idealization of the subject of human rights discourse relies upon the implicit pedagogical regulation of an educable subject of human rights.

These implicit features of educability are a foundational part of liberal,

Enlightenment-era, humanist ideals that drive much of human rights discourse. Briefly: this ideal normalizes the human as an individual, rational being, whose highest form is represented by the positivist, Cartesian mastery of mind over body. Within this ideal, humans are coded aesthetically and axiologically through binaries of “good” and “evil,”

“male” and “female,” “white” and “non-white,” and so on. Abdul R. JanMohamed

16 describes these binaries as the economy of the Manichean allegory, which is “a field of diverse yet interchangeable oppositions” that creates a colonial power structure built on racial difference between the “putative superiority of the European and the supposed inferiority of the native” (JanMohamed 63). The liberal imperative of the intellect’s mastery over the body undergirds the “common good” of society’s ordered structures of law, property, and education. These eighteenth-century notions continue to structure what

Walter Mignolo evocatively observes of human rights discourse today: that Western imperial knowledge “owns” the concept of the human (Speaks for the Human 10).

Within these ideas, educability exists as part of a nation and citizenship-building enterprise, established through what Benedict Anderson calls “imagined” (literate, educated) communities.22 Predominant Western legal notions of human rights also participate in and rely upon these exclusionary imagined communities. Kelly Oliver observes that subjects within these exclusionary frameworks “exist only at the expense of their others” (6). For Oliver, recognition, in this sense, presupposes a framework of oppression (9). This framework is marked by a dynamic of hierarchy, privilege, and domination that we see at work in the logic of the idealized liberal subject of human rights (9). Oliver’s argument highlights how situating recognition as the mandate of human rights can reinscribe the violence of the social and economic structure that created the need for recognition in the first place. This paradox is most famously articulated by

Hannah Arendt in her oft-quoted observation on the exclusionary state of exception of human rights, highlighted by the plight of stateless populations. She writes that “their plight is not that they are equal before the law, but that no law exists for them; not that

22 See Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (1991).

17 they are oppressed, but that nobody wants to oppress them” (293). The exclusion at the heart of human rights legal discourse mirrors the implicit metrics of liberal educability; those who are not educable are not accounted for within the realm of human rights. As

Oliver’s argument helps clarify, in order for a subject to be educable, she must first be recognizable. However, Arendt’s comments demonstrate that liberal recognition excises those with qualities outside of its own metrics.

The subjugation and exclusion of those who are not, as Elizabeth Anker pinpoints,

“white, male, straight, fully healthy, and free of disabilities” characterize the implicit metrics of educability at work in human rights discourse (25). Anker’s central argument is that the notion of “dignity” celebrated and safeguarded by human rights is rooted in the notion of bodily integrity. The mastery of the mind over a pure, unviolated body structures liberal notions of good and evil, of civility, barbarism, and human progress

(Anker 18-19). In highlighting the deep ambivalence of liberal discourse toward embodiment, Anker reveals an implicit framework of pedagogical mastery as the means of achieving that liberal ideal. In this strictly vertical pedagogy, the supposed realization of the promise of “the human personality” in human rights occurs by locating the intellect, detached from the body, in a centralized position of authority. One imagines the mind as a lecturer, in command of all other obediently receptive parts of the body.

Further instantiating Kelly Oliver’s observations, the liberal humanist recognition of the intellect excludes other modes of knowledge or learning that may be formed through embodiment.

The second feature of the embedded educational framework of human rights reflects the social covenant of liberal subjects as always already incorporated into society

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(which similarly enables the always-exclusion of those who are not). In Human Rights

Inc., Joseph Slaughter maps the tautological logic of human rights legal language, a logic that incorporates citizens as self-determining rights-bearers while socializing them as human rights subjects. I engage in some depth with Slaughter’s argument in the remaining pages of this introduction in order to amplify the connection he establishes between notions of human rights and the “novel of education,” while also to interrogate the formations of educability and pedagogy at the root of that education.

Slaughter argues that the concept of self-determination trumpeted in human rights documents is tied to a civilizing imperative, and is an indicator of this “incorporative process by which the person transcends its individuality and amplifies into the community and the stage to emerge in the international sphere as a bearer of human rights and duties” (222). The already-incorporated human rights person—the idealized liberal, educable subject—embodies a plotted process of learning that always already models the educability they must reflect in order to be a human rights person. Slaughter convincingly argues that the Bildungsroman, the “coming of age” or “education” novel, shares a reliance on this trope of incorporation and completes the social incorporation that the legal language of human rights cannot fulfill alone. He argues that the

Bildungsroman renders the self-aware subject of human rights “retroactively responsible for its plot of personality development” (103). This retroactively inherent (and exclusive) incorporation is established specifically through the status of rights as “self-evident.”

Declaring an idea to be self-evident embeds its metrics and conceptual framework as implicit; it is a way of imbuing something with power through naturalization. Hernán

Vidal’s observation that “power does not function well unless its disciplinary potential is

19 relegated to the background” emphasizes why a logic of self-evidence, counterintuitively, is a logic of implicitness rather than explicitness (37). The logic of self-evidence is hermetic and, as Jolly argues regarding spectacular violence, forestalls dialogue or reflection upon the ethical constructs through which we understand an event, policy, or course of action (14). Slaughter’s argument highlights how, through a self-evident logic of incorporation, the discourse of human rights becomes both a metric and a medium of development even as it elides liberal educability as the fundamental tool of that development. Slaughter draws out this tautology of development by linking it to the genre of the Bildungsroman, but does so without interrogating the metrics and structures of education upon which that development relies.

These shared features of the educable subject and the liberal subject of human rights are foundational to the United Nations’ Universal Declaration for Human Rights

(UDHR). The document employs pedagogical language to establish both a metric and a medium of rights. This pedagogical language upholds the features of a Cartesian divide between the mind and the body, as well as the inherent, incorporative, self-evident status of the human rights-bearing person. The document establishes the primacy of the “human family” in the preamble, then situates it further in Article 16, declaring that it is “the natural and fundamental group unit of society and is entitled to protection by society and the state” (“Universal Declaration of Human Rights”). This emphasis on the family as the natural structure of society, a structure coded with gendered norms, reflects the way in which states rely upon traditional family frameworks to establish authority.23 The U.N. extrapolates language from this state-based framework as a means of instilling that same

23 I discuss this history in greater depth through the case of Argentina in Chapter One.

20 sense of authority in human rights as a supra-national concept. Paradoxically, however, this results in undermining the trans-national and “universal” claim of the mandate of human rights. Indeed, Article 26, which focuses on education, asserts the a priori right of parents to “choose the kind of education that shall be given to their children.” This clause creates a caveat to the kind of education mandated by the UDHR, in which education is compulsory, free, and “directed to the full development of the human personality,” and

“shall promote understanding, tolerance and friendship among all nations, racial or religious groups, and shall further the activities of the United Nations for the maintenance of peace” (Article 26). Thus, the “human family” as a traditional structure establishes a tension within the authority of human rights as a universal concept, while undergirding the qualities of educability upon which the document relies.

The preamble of the UDHR clearly demonstrates a fundamental reliance on educability as a metric and medium of human rights. The declaration of the primacy of the human family is followed by a call to develop a “common understanding” of human potential that has not yet been realized. The document moves that

Therefore…THE GENERAL ASSEMBLY proclaims THIS UNIVERSAL

DECLARATION OF HUMAN RIGHTS as a common standard of achievement

for all peoples and all nations, to the end that every individual and every organ of

society, keeping this Declaration constantly in mind, shall strive by teaching and

education to promote respect for these rights and freedoms and by progressive

measures, national and international, to secure their universal and effective

recognition and observance, both among the people of Member States themselves

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and among the peoples of territories under their jurisdiction. (“Preamble”; my

emphasis)

This language suggests that a declaration of human rights is inextricable from the declaration of a pedagogical mandate and means through which human rights exist. Each of the human rights subjects named in this preamble (all peoples, all nations) is charged with striving, through teaching and education, toward the achievement of a benchmark: the “common standard” of human rights. The phrase “every organ” both demonstrates the incorporative trope observed by Slaughter and the ambivalence toward embodiment observed by Anker. Most notable, perhaps, is that the document establishes teaching— not learning—as the grounding point from which the standard is to be achieved. Teaching suggests an already-established mastery to be disseminated among those who do not yet have that mastery. The common standard—the pedagogical benchmark by which all are measured—trickles downward and outward in a vertical hierarchy. As conceived by the

UDHR, human rights subjects are always already educated; they teach while others learn.

Article 26 clarifies “education” as “directed to the full development of the human personality and to the strengthening of respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms.” The “full development of the human personality,” then, specifically means the cultivation of the ideal liberal subject. The language of the UDHR suggests that the legal institution of human rights not only overlaps with and is realized by the Bildungsroman, but institutionalizes a liberal, humanist pedagogical imaginary. This begs the question:

Does human rights discourse make other forms of pedagogy, and other formations of educability, impossible?

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Despite the prevalence of educational language in human rights discourse, scholars working at the intersection of literature and human rights have not incorporated a robust lexicon for distinguishing between different pedagogical registers, subjects, and processes—and thus, for answering this question. In order to begin to identify educable subjecthood and human rights pedagogies outside of the Bildungsroman logics highlighted by Slaughter, I turn to Johan Galtung and Paulo Freire to introduce a lexicon for addressing distinctions between training, education, and pedagogy.

Galtung’s 1975 essay “Literacy, education and schooling—for what?” maps these concepts onto the language and mechanisms of the human community imagined by the

UDHR. Galtung explains that this human community is “a liberal society . . . fostered by the European post-Renaissance tradition and tempered with industrial capitalism”

(“Literacy” 40). Galtung identifies education as a broader concept than what is “currently served by schooling” (39). He distinguishes schooling as an individualistic tool of

Western liberal economies. Galtung identifies schooling, specifically, as the medium of development for a liberal society. He draws a connection between schooling, centralization, and nation-building that establishes authority and power at the top of a vertical slope (42, 46). Schooling legitimizes the vertical divisions of power and labor “as much as lack of schooling justifies the misery and powerlessness” of those without opportunities (40). Schooling, then, both subordinates and elides the authority of any other formations of knowledge or other processes of learning experienced outside of its structure. Galtung’s argument draws a connection between the lived conditions of those under liberal capitalism, the idealized liberal notions of the Enlightenment at the root of

23 human rights discourse, and the structure of schooling as the technology of those shared social and economic structures.24

Galtung’s language and analysis is closely in step with Paulo Freire’s description of a banking pedagogy, in which “knowledge is a gift bestowed by those who consider themselves knowledgeable upon those whom they consider to know nothing” (Pedagogy

72). Though Galtung does not use the term “banking education,” he, too, describes schooling pupils as “receptacles . . . just being filled, occasionally tapped to check the quality of the knowledge liquid” (“Literacy” 41). Galtung’s evocative depiction captures both the way in which students are educable subjects—receptacles to be filled—and the processes by which learning occurs and is identified—the successful filling of empty receptacles.

Freire’s notion of “banking pedagogy” helps us draw a connection between educable subjectivity, forms of narration, and forms of learning. Freire develops this concept out of the racialized, implicit framework of a colonial education and its enduring legacies in the capitalist state.25 Within banking pedagogy, subjects are recognized through what he identifies as a structure of narration. He writes:

A careful analysis of the teacher-student relationship at any level, inside or

outside the school, reveals its fundamentally narrative character. This relationship

24 In some ways, his analysis echoes Foucault’s writing on the disciplinary systems that manifest themselves from schools to prisons and are focused on the production of docile learning bodies whose successful integration reinforces the structures of power supporting that production (152-53). 25 Freire primarily discusses this framework through the dichotomous relationship of oppressor and oppressed, aligning it with the banking relationship between teacher and student. He does, however, refer explicitly to colonized and colonizer when he engages directly with the work of Albert Memmi and Franz Fanon (Pedagogy 48-49).

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involves a narrating Subject (the teacher) and patient, listening objects (the

students). The contents, whether values or empirical dimensions of reality, tend in

the process of being narrated to become lifeless and petrified. Education is

suffering from narration sickness. (Freire, Pedagogy 71; original emphasis)

Elizabeth Anker’s method of attending to the language of embodied wellness is appropriate here. To Anker’s point, Freire emphasizes the problematic nature of a banking pedagogy through a metaphor of illness, even if he does so with the intention of dismantling this language and its effect on oppressed humans. Still, the phrase “education is suffering from narration sickness” introduces a connection between narrative form and the vertical hierarchy of liberal society; the desired qualities of educability, of learning, come down to a student’s ability and willingness to receive that narrative. Irrespective of whether or not such a pedagogy is actually effective in achieving its intention, Freire’s analogy evokes the violence of an education that is built on instrumentalization without recognition. In practice, learners are not necessarily convinced by this education, but a banking education only recognizes those who are convinced of this process as educable.

Reading Myra Bergam-Ramos’s translation of this section, one might think that

Freire interprets narrative itself as a fundamentally “banking” form of art and thus that any pedagogical relation established through literature is likewise fundamentally a

“banking” one. However, I interpret Freire’s oft-quoted equivalence between education and the sickness of narration as a specific form of what Mikhail Bakhtin calls monologism, in which “another person remains wholly and merely an object of consciousness, and not another consciousness” (Bakhtin, Dostoevsky 292). For Bakhtin, as for Freire, the human never arrives at a finalized form, but is always becoming, always

25 in-formation (Rule, Dialogue 934). Monologism, like a banking pedagogy, enacts its violence by transforming those with whom it establishes a relation into instrumentalized objects of its own representation, foreclosing the possibility and open-endedness of continual growth. For Freire, the human imperative of growth through dialogism is the dialectical development of conscientização.26 Bakhtin, however, rejects dialectics as an ideological and programmatic mode of synthesis that obliterates the polyphonic nature of the word (932). For Bakhtin, dialogue maintains the open-ness and unfinalizability of the fundamental polyphony and heteroglossia of a word (Discourse 279). Nevertheless, for both Freire and Bakhtin, dialogue is central to learning as a relation and an ongoing process of becoming.

If we examine the Portuguese rhetoric of Pedagogia do oprimido, Freire appears to be concerned with narration specifically in Bakhtin’s sense of the monological. When

Freire discusses the fundamentally narrative character of education, he clearly links it to narrative that is made by a monological speaker: “serem relações fundamentalmente narradoras, dissertadoras” (Pedagogia 79; my emphasis). Further, his assertion that

“education is suffering from narration sickness” is followed in the Portuguese with an antidote for this banking sickness, which Bergam-Ramos left out of the translation: “A tônica da educação é preponderantemente esta—narrar, sempre narrar” (79), which I would translate as: “the antidote to this education is preponderantly to narrate—always to narrate.” If we situate this antidote within Freire’s commitment to learning as dialogue,

26 Myra Bergam-Ramos maintains Freire’s term conscientização throughout her translation, commenting in a footnote that “[t]he term conscientização refers to learning to perceive social, political, and economic contradictions, and to take action against the oppressive elements of reality” (35). Unlike the Western conception of “consciousness” as a phenomenon isolated within the mind, Freire’s conscientização exists in praxis.

26 we see that for Freire, it is possible for narration to be the sickness (as monologue) and the antidote (as dialogue). This linkage helps us better understand how narration, seen dialogically, can represent an alternative form of pedagogy—aesthetic and social—that has the potential to interrupt the instrumentalization of a banking pedagogy. Though I will discuss other figures of critical, feminist, and feminist of color pedagogy throughout this dissertation, I use Freire’s language of “banking pedagogy” specifically to indicate the learning subject embedded and normalized within the liberal discourse of rights.

Galtung and Freire’s concepts raise the question: How do literary texts, as mediums of literacy, participate in the banking pedagogy of human rights? The problem that Slaughter’s argument suggests is that human rights discourse broadly relegates literacy, and literature, to banking pedagogy. Slaughter focuses specifically on the role of the Bildungsroman in the cultivation and regulation of a certain kind of human rights literacy, but the very etymology of the term “literature” is entwined with the disciplinary training of customs and behaviors. As Michael Allan recently phrased it, “literature” already implies “an instantiation of a certain type of learning” (79). In other words, the term “literature” presumes a self-evident form of literacy, one in which the reader reads literature correctly. Similarly, the pedagogical endeavor of human rights literacy presumes a reader who already knows how to be obedient to the learning expectations of that human rights discourse. It furthermore presumes that the reader will be obedient.

This history and its colonial elaboration has been discussed broadly by postcolonial and critical black studies theorists such as Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, Gayatri Spivak, Sylvia

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Wynter, and Jodi Melamed.27 From their work, we can discern how “literacy” becomes obedience to a range of learned responses to literature. These responses delineate between “thinking” educable subjects—recognized within human rights, and

“unthinking,” ineducable subjects—excluded from human rights.

If literacy enables access to self-evident, rights bearing status, then literature, as a medium for discerning and articulating educable subjectivities, can either enable the exclusions of human rights or redistribute this access. Johan Galtung is helpful once again in considering how literacy, and thus literature, might also structure other kinds of pedagogy, and with that, other modes of educability. He extracts the meaning of literacy from its role in schooling, asking, “[S]hould not literacy be defined more broadly as how to deal with words in a social setting, not merely how to read and write them?”

(“Literacy” 45; original emphasis). Galtung’s emphasis here is on the relational and social nature of literacy. In this sense, literacy becomes the ability to enter into a horizontal collective rather than a vertical hierarchy or individualist undertaking, “to enter into a dialogue as equal in importance to the ability to read or write” (45). Social collectivity and dialogue are also crucial to Paulo Freire’s antidote to a banking education. For him, an education of liberation and thus, I would argue, a narration of liberation, rejects deposit-making and replaces it with “the posing of the problems of human beings in their relations with the world” (Freire, Pedagogy 79).

Galtung might be mistaken for a literary scholar when he asserts that “[t]here is an intimate relation between form and content”; yet he identifies this structure of meaning as

27 See, for example, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o’s Decolonizing the Mind (1986), Spivak’s In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (1987), Wynter’s “On How We Mistook the Map for the Territory. . .” (2006), and Melamed’s Represent and Destroy (2011).

28 learning rather than as literature, arguing that “schooling and education are two ways of combining different forms and different contents” (43). Thus, when extracted from the banking framework of schooling, literacy, like literature, involves a speech act that

“creates a community of willing listeners” (Jolly 16). Rosemary Jolly reminds us that listening is a key to how narrative engenders meaning (3). She alerts us to the fact that

“speech communities” can engage in “deaf listening,” a form that “captures certain subjects within the contemporary social, political and cultural moment, while remaining constitutionally ‘deaf’ (a revealing pun) to others” (Jolly 5). Galtung’s sense of literacy works against “deaf listening” in that it foregrounds a plurality of literacies (and thus, a plurality of educabilities) rather than a single framework in which a person can be literate or achieve literacy.

If the violence inherent in what Galtung identifies as the combination of form and content in schooling is not clear in his essay, Franz Fanon makes it unmistakable when he describes the workings of colonialism as “emptying the native’s brain of all form and content” (210). The erasure of other(ed), subjugated subjects of liberal human rights discourse, so evocatively illustrated by Fanon’s comments, is, I would argue a form of what Diana Taylor calls a “percepticide”: a training of the mind to overlook extant violence (Disappearing Acts 121). Liberalism relies on the existence of ineducable subjects, but an existence that is excluded, subjugated, and, most importantly, rendered invisible. This rendering-invisible is what enables the “self-evidence” of the liberal, formalist emplotment of human rights; it also how human rights shares its grammar with racial capitalism. Jose Fusté, writing on racial-colonial capitalism, identifies its reliance on “divide-and-rule effects in which some groups benefit from the marginalization of

29 other groups, while liberalism and its reliance on a legal subject that is purportedly colorless and colorblind disallows group rights and delegitimizes reparations for broad constituencies affected by colonialism” (109; my emphasis). In process and in practice, this grammar becomes a banking pedagogy that treats its learners as subjugated “beings for others” (Freire, Pedagogy 74).

Fusté’s language highlights how these othered subjects remain in society as invisible waste: they are the tare of a purportedly colorless and colorblind liberal human rights oriented as a natural “zero” to those who are accounted for within it.28 My usage of

“tare” draws from what Zygmunt Baumann calls the “the production of ‘human waste’, or more correctly wasted humans (the ‘excessive’ and ‘redundant’, that is the population of those who either could not or were not wished to be recognized or allowed to stay),” as an inevitable outcome of the project of modernity (3). Metrics of educability that produce such “waste” as tare (necessarily present but made imperceptible) drive rationales for colonialism, state terrorism, and other human rights violations. As Fanon writes in The

Wretched of the Earth, the colonized operate as the “natural background” for the colonizers (250). Tared humans exist as the implicit, self-evident objects of a liberal human rights discourse that, to borrow Freire’s language, depicts the marginalized as ill, as “the pathology of the healthy society, which must therefore adjust these ‘incompetent and lazy’ folk to its own patterns by changing their mentality.” My contention is that

28 The “tare” refers to the weight of a container prior to its re-orientation, or re-naturalization, to zero. This is how goods held in containers are weighed. (For example, if you use a kitchen scale for baking, you place an empty bowl on the scale, hit “tare,” then add the flour you need to measure.) The term comes from, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, the “French tare (15th cent. in Hatzfeld & Darmesteter) waste or deterioration in goods, deficiency, imperfection, also as in English, = medieval Latin tara, Italian tara, Provençal tara, Spanish tara, Portuguese tara, Old Spanish atara (Littré), < Arabic ṭarḥah that which is thrown away, < ṭaraḥa to reject.”

30 when literature and human rights scholarship remains rooted in formalist readings of language and representation, it re-creates the structures of learning that produce the excluded, othered subjects for whom human rights discourse ostensibly desires to account. Literature can be complicit in reifying the exclusions of human rights, or literature can help dismantle them; the extent to which humanistic scholars interrogate this pedagogical position can, to indulge in a legal metaphor, help tilt the scale.

By way of closing, I want to address how we might develop a practice of reading that discerns alternative claims of educability and other modes of learning. My primary argument is that we can begin to do so by tracing the role of the Long Sixties learner in the Americas in the texts I address in my cases. I contend that these texts direct us to attend to the second register of the “educable subject” with which this dissertation engages: the educable subject of human rights is also the reader (or, as I will discuss later, the audience more broadly) who learns about human rights through literature. They are the subjects invoked by the pedagogical language that dominates scholarly conversations about what human rights literature does: it teaches us. Scholars debate whether the object of that teaching is sympathy, moral responsibility, empathy, recognition, listening, or action—but all of these possibilities rest on a pedagogical relationship that renders audiences as educable subjects of human rights teaching through literature.

Scholars tend to deploy this relation in service of an argument about what literature can “do” for human rights: that a reader’s engagement with a text can result in actionable impact on human lives, primarily because literature purportedly teaches

31 readers to have empathy for the “others” whom they encounter through a text.29 The problem with this well-worn argument is that, like “human rights literacy,” it positions readers as passive recipients of a text’s authority and presumes that readers are always already incorporated into a text’s naturalized, affective and moral habitus. Ultimately, this argument echoes what Slaughter has observed in the case of the Bildungsroman: that literature expands upon and completes the necessary affective and moral education for human rights subjectivity, yet in doing so, re-affirms the exclusionary educability demanded by that (banking) education. Scholars’ reliance on a pedagogical raison d'être for human rights literature, yet aversion to a truly sustained examination of that pedagogy, suggests that “pedagogy” has become—for them—a synonym for instrumentalization. In essence, these scholars have inadvertently adopted liberal human rights discourse’s reliance on educability as indebtedness. As a result, scholarship about human rights and literature has developed a naturalized blind spot to the implications of the pedagogical framework upon which it stands. In maintaining this blind spot, scholars have missed one of the most crucial, compelling ways that literature can be a praxis for representing and re-imagining human rights subjectivities and the processes through which claims to rights are made.

29 Scholars usually present this argument about empathy without providing any indication of how we might assess its efficacy (assessment, like pedagogy, does not only indicate positivist standardization or quantitative interpretation). For examples of how scholars rely on un-examined pedagogical language in their analyses of human rights literature, see Slaughter, as well James Dawes (2007), Lynn Hunt (2007), and David Palumbo-Liu (2012). For examples of how the “teaching of empathy” argument is made to mount defenses for the humanities more broadly, see Martha Nussbaum’s Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education (1997) or, more recently, Peter Brooks and Hilary Jewett’s collection, The Humanities and Public Life (2014), and Helen Small’s The Value of the Humanities (2016

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The cases I examine in this dissertation reveal this blind spot, and demonstrate how aesthetic formations of and claims to educability intervene in this underlying feature of human rights discourse. I proceed through what I call a pedagogical reading. This method approaches a literary text not only as a material form or an aesthetic collection of words and images, but also as a framework for relations and interactions among communities.30 Peter Schillingsburg’s cartography of the study of literature is helpful here for conceptualizing the relation between these approaches to literary analysis, and for representing how I am situating a pedagogical reading both formally and sociologically/historically. Schillingsburg maps literary study across two axes, with the literary “work” located in the middle (Figure 1). One axis represents what he calls the

“rhetorical axis of communication,” while the other captures “the mimetic axis of representation.” 31

Figure 0-1. "Text as Matter, Concept, and Action." Page 39.

30 While I am inspired by Anker’s approach of attending to embodiment in human rights literature as a corrective to this aversion, my approach to pedagogical reading specifically keeps its focus on the processes of formation along with form. In doing so, I am building upon, but moving purposefully away from, human rights legal discourses and rhetoric as the dominant intersection for human rights and literary examination, and toward the pedagogical as a generative axis of meaning. 31 Schillingsburg draws these terms from a chart made by Paul Hernadi in “Literary Theory,” Introduction to Scholarship in Modern Languages and Literatures (New York: Modern Language Association, 1981). I use the term “cartography” because Schillingsburg calls his chart a “map.”

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Schillingsburg’s map, while not all-encompassing, visually locates some predominant factors of analysis. The mimetic axis encompasses formal concerns, while the rhetorical axis engages with sociological questions.32 While I would not advocate reading this map as a strictly compartmentalized directive for literary relations, Schillingsburg’s framework is helpful because it allows us to visualize how much of human rights and literary scholarship is rooted in formalist, vertical readings of texts. The legal rhetoric with which human rights literary scholarship has predominantly engaged is necessarily empirical and exclusionary, and operates on the same formalist, vertical plane. Both legal rhetoric and formalist readings invite dynamic interpretive engagement but structure a mode of analysis that cannot reach beyond the letter of the word.

In contrast, a pedagogical framework encourages us to move between both axes of analysis. Because pedagogy pertains to a relational framework, it opens up our analysis to the horizontal axis. Because these relations form through (either within or in contention with) an established structure, a pedagogical analysis also encompasses a formal, vertical analysis.33 Schillingsburg’s spatial orientation of verticality is apt, because it visually emphasizes the vertical hierarchy of authority embedded in liberal subjecthood and its modes of educability. When we look to our “blind spot” and consider both literary relationships and literary interpretations pedagogically, we can see how vertically rooted frameworks structure banking pedagogies and subjectivities. We can

32 One crucial factor of analysis that is missing on this map is the mode of production and distribution. I also would specify how “time” and “place” indicate specific societal contexts and social forces including gender, race, and socioeconomic status. I would add “intention” on the side of the reader, just as it exists on the side of the author. 33 Michael Allan also calls for an alternative trajectory for literary study, one “focused not on what but how texts are read. We thus shift away from mimesis as the foundational category of literary theory to consider the disciplines and practices that inscribe how literature comes to matter” (77). This “mattering” is situated pedagogically; Allan approaches literature “as both a category of text and a pedagogical practice” (12).

34 learn this approach by attending to the pedagogies formed within these American literary texts and the broader cases in which they are situated.

My first chapter, “‘A whirlwind and, perhaps, a seedbed’: The Aesthetics of

Willful Learning in Post-Proceso Argentina,” looks at the role of what I call “willful learning” in works of cultural remembrance after Argentina’s last dictatorship. The context of Argentina allows me to discuss the qualities of the paradigmatic figure of the student of the Long Sixties; I do so by examining her presence in representations of

Argentine remembrance and public pedagogy of the human rights violations of the nation’s last dictatorship. I draw together Sara Ahmed’s work on the willful subject with

Idelber Avelar’s formation of the allegorical ruin in post-dictatorial literature in order to trace the role of this figure in two pivotal works of Argentine human rights remembrance.

Through a reading of Alicia Partnoy’s The Little School (1986) and its later publication in

Spanish as La Escuelita (2006), I demonstrate how Partnoy presents willful learning as a crucial mode of resistance to the violent, misogynist, and authoritarian instruction of the dictatorship. I then examine the role of the willful learner in Luis Puenzo’s Oscar- winning film, La historia oficial (1985). Ultimately, I argue that both texts invite audiences to risk willful human rights learning as means of resisting hegemonic global discourses that deploy instructional, “banking” benchmarks of human rights comportment in order to justify structural violence.

My second chapter, “Palimpsestic Pedagogy: Roberto Bolaño’s Amulet of Human

Rights Learning,” takes up the case of the Tlatelolco massacre and its remembrance in

Mexico. Through this case, I examine how the figure of the Long Sixties student became synonymous with the narrative of masculine sacrifice in the literary remembrance of

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Tlatelolco. I argue that through his novel Amuleto (1999, trans. Amulet), Bolaño imagines a literary pedagogy of Tlatelolco remembrance that departs from this legacy while foregrounding the university as a violent and complicit space of liberal educability.

Through the journey of Auxilio, the novel’s central learner, Bolaño communicates a feminist of color pedagogy that disrupts and revises linear remembrance narratives of human rights and liberal educability. I turn to M. Jacqui Alexander’s notion of the palimpsest and to Gloria Anzaldúa’s theorizations of the borderlands to draw out

Auxilio’s pedagogy within 1968–era Mexico as a space of geographic and literary crossing.

My final chapter, “Writing Out of the Obituary: Puerto Rican Indebtedness and

Poetic Learning,” focuses on Pedro Pietri’s contemporaneous writing of Puerto Rican

Obituary (1971) and his work with the radical pedagogical organization, the Teachers and Writers Collaborative (TWC). As part of its decolonial and memorializing project,

Puerto Rican Obituary makes a critical link between social resilience and pedagogical resistance to the ongoing effects of U.S. colonialism on the Puerto Rican community. In the poetry of this collection, Pietri identifies a pedagogy of indebtedness as a racial capitalist tool for the cultural, economic, and physical death of Puerto Ricans. I affirm that this contemporaneity invites us to read his poetry alongside the correspondence and

TWC material that he saved, now stored in the archives of Hunter College’s Centro de

Estudios Puertorriqueños.34 In doing so, I propose that Pietri’s poetic articulation of, and resistance to, indebtedness can be read beyond the page and into the communal spaces of

34 I examined this archival material, stored in the Pedro Pietri Papers at the Centro in New York, in November of 2015.

36 learning; the poetic resistance Pietri imagines through Puerto Rican Obituary can be extended to the praxis of its afterlives in classrooms. Reading Pietri’s work through this pedagogical relation helps us identify ways that artistic, embodied knowledge takes formation and becomes a site of persistent resistance to the technologies of racial capitalism.

These American case studies of Long Sixties learners reveal how alternative pedagogical frameworks of human rights can be articulated by learners themselves, in both literary work and in its audiences. By attending to the students of human rights in the Americas, we can learn to recognize the specific form of educability upon which the liberal subject of human rights relies. In turn, we can also more effectively examine how alternative claims to educability resist and revise a liberal framework of human rights recognition that enables racialized state capitalism. Most importantly, we can integrate these claims into our classroom and university spaces as protections against the instrumentalization of both literature and its readership.

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CHAPTER ONE

“A WHIRLWIND AND, PERHAPS, A SEEDBED”: THE AESTHETICS OF WILLFUL LEARNING IN POST-PROCESO ARGENTINA

“QUE LOS LÁPICES SIGAN ESCRIBIENDO”

In the large foyer of the main building on the campus of the former Escuela

Mecánica de la Armada,35 now the Espacio Memoria y Derechos Humanos or the Ex-

ESMA,36 high school students work in a cacophony of conversation as they develop presentation materials for their peers and the public. They work under the filtered light coming through windows covered in black and white portraits of students and activists, images of the “disappeared” that became globally recognizable thanks to the activism of the Madres and Abuelas of the Plaza de Mayo.

The subject of their work is Argentina’s period of state terrorism known as the

Proceso Nacional de Reorganización (National Reorganization Process) from 1976 to

1983. After a series of unstable governments and earlier dictatorships, military leaders

Jorge Videla, Emilio Massera, and Orlando Ramón Agosti enacted a coup d’état against then-President Isabel Perón and her government. The coup was part of a Cold War “anti- communist” campaign backed by the United States called Plan Condór (Operation

Condor). This operation oversaw the cultivation of military coups throughout South

America. These regimes violently repressed labor movements and students organizing

35 Navy Petty-Officers School of Mechanics. 36 Memory and Human Rights Space. Both names—Espacio Memoria and Ex-ESMA—are actively used by docents and librarians who work there.

38 against the nascent neoliberal economic interests driving Plan Cóndor. The Comisión

Nacional sobre la Desaparición de Personas37 (CONADEP; National Comission on the

Disappearance of Persons) would later observe in its extensive report, Nunca más: informe de la Comisión Nacional sobre la Desaparición de Personas (Never Again:

Report of the National Comission on the Disappearance of Persons), that this period began with a clash of extremes in a way that European nations had once seen,

“convulsionada por un terror que provenía tanto desde la extrema derecho como de la extrema izquierda” (“thrown into turmoil by a terror that came as much from the extreme right as the extreme left”; “Prólogo”). But, the report goes on to say, the Argentine government’s response to these clashes was unlike anything seen in those other countries.

CONADEP asserts that “a los delitos de los terroristas, las Fuerzas Armadas respondieron con un terrorismo infinitamente peor que el combatido, porque desde el 24 de marzo de 1976 contaron con el poderío y la impunidad del Estado absoluto, secuestrando, torturando y asesinando a miles de seres humanos” (“The armed forces responded to the crimes of the terrorists with a terrorism infinitely worse than that which they were combating, because from March 24, 1976, they had the power and impunity of the Absolute State—kidnapping, torturing, and murdering thousands of human beings”).

The estimated number of victims who passed through torture centers like the Ex-

ESMA rounds out at 30,000. That casualty figure rises when accounting for the intergenerational trauma experienced by the nation: families whose loved ones remain unaccounted for, whose questions and pain are passed on to younger generations; grandparents who are still searching for their kidnapped grandchildren, raised by military

37 National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons.

39 families; now-adult children of disappeared and assassinated parents grappling with their identities and histories;38 unresolved and ongoing judicial processes for members of the military; and the lasting psychological and cultural effects that the violence of state terrorism has on a society, broadly, for generations. When Raúl Alfonsín was elected president in 1983, he convened CONADEP to gather information about the crimes that would be utilized in public trials of those involved. Those trials were interrupted when the subsequent president, Carlos Meném, issued presidential pardons to military leaders in the name of national reconciliation. In the 2000s, the trials resumed and are ongoing at the time of this writing. Argentina’s recovery continues through the work of lawyers, activists, survivors, writers, artists, and educators.

Thanks to these efforts, students born years after Argentina’s return to democracy can engage directly in the recuperative memory work that has emerged in the Proceso’s wake.39 The scene of students working inside the Espacio Memoria is recorded in a

YouTube video about the center’s education and activism program, “La escuela va a los juicios” (“School Goes to Trial”). In the program, students and teachers attend meetings with activists and survivors, observe the ongoing trials of members of the regime, and develop creative and critical responses that contribute to the work of remembrance. I had the opportunity to see these students present films they had made as part of the Espacio

38 The Madres de Plaza de Mayo (Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo), Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo (Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo), and H.I.J.O.S.: Hijos e Hijas por la identidad y la Justicia contra el Olvido y el Silencio (Sons and Daughters for Identity and Justice Against Forgetting and Silence) are the three major organizations supporting these efforts. 39 I refer to the period as the Proceso because it emphasizes the public disciplinary mandate of the dictatorship. I nevertheless recognize that common parlance in Argentina is to refer to the period as “la última dictadura,” or “the last dictatorship.”

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Memoria’s observance of the fortieth anniversary of the military coup.40 While students were screening their work and discussing their observations of the trials, the rest of the memory park was bustling with visitors participating in artistic activities and exhibitions commemorating the anniversary. The Ex-ESMA had become a dynamic pedagogical space where visitors are both teachers and learners of the Proceso and its ongoing effects.

This space of memorialization and learning was operating across, as Peter Schillingsburg maps them, the vertical axis of formal meaning (the documents, exhibitions, films that visitors consumed) and the horizontal axis of relational, contextual formations of meaning (visitors were also creating, changing, and dialoging the texts that served as a space of encounter for that meaning-making).41

One activity in particular exemplified how this memorial space was operating across these two axes. In one corner of the gallery, an interactive exhibition called “Que los lápices sigan escribiendo” (“May the pencils keep writing”) quietly encouraged visitors to contribute messages on its wall (Fig. 1). The title of the exhibition references

“la Noche de los Lápices” (“the Night of the Pencils”), an ordeal in September 1976 during which a group of students accused of being militant guerrillas were kidnapped, tortured, and disappeared.

40 One film that stuck with me depicted affectless students staring, day after day, at an affectless teacher. With each returning day, their numbers dwindle and some students begin to appear with blindfolds. The short film evokes the way institutional spaces—the Universidad de Buenos Aires (the University of Buenos Aires) and the Colegio Nacional de Buenos Aires (the National High School of Buenos Aires) in particular—were focal points of both student activism and disappearances. 41 See Shillingsburg, "Text as Matter, Concept, and Action." Page 39.

41

Figure 1-1: “Que los lápices sigan escribiendo.” Photo taken by the author; March 24, 2016.

The title’s lack of direct citation to the events indicates how deeply the phrase and the events of “la Noche de los Lápices” are ingrained in Argentine cultural memory. The exhibition does not contextualize its directive with information, photographs, or other icons of the Noche; “Que los lápices sigan escribiendo” is an amplification of the student sentiment that became the target of the military that Noche, and is an answer to the military’s violent, disciplinary response to that sentiment. Paired with the colorful pens hanging on strings along the exhibition’s otherwise blank wall, the title encourages visitors to adopt a willful stance to the military’s “instruction” of the students on “la

Noche de los Lápices” by continuing the writing—the learning—that, the title suggests, the students began. My photograph of this exhibition could be transposed onto

Schillingsburg’s map: the vertical, formal axis of community-authored words form a new text about that infamous night; the horizontal axis captures the formation of those words through the actions of those visitors, in that space, on that day. The audiences of this text are also its authors, taking up the pencils and becoming themselves the students who are

42 called still to write, still to resist authoritarianism and continue to engage in acts of learning that undermine it.

“Que los lápices sigan escribiendo,” the screening and discussion of the student films, and the other activities of the day suggested that for the Ex-ESMA, learning about human rights is not only about what is remembered about the rights’ violations (the form), but how the Proceso is remembered—the structures and processes through which this remembrance comes about (the formation). The fortieth anniversary activities rendered the sedimentary layers of this pedagogical space starkly visible: what was once home to regimented naval officer training, then evolved into the horrors of a torture center, now hosts a museum at the site of the torture center, a cultural center (Centro

Cultural Haroldo Conti), and offices for human rights groups. The once deeply disciplinary pedagogical space had been reclaimed for activist and multi-modal learning.

The Ex-ESMA presented this learning as crucial to Argentina’s recovery and to the cultural work of remembrance. The trajectory of the Espacio Memoria offers an analogue for my examination of how post-Proceso literary texts are also a cultural space of pedagogical transformation within Argentina’s human rights work.

This chapter addresses how cultural texts of remembrance have also been places where authors and audiences imagine counter-pedagogies to those of the dictatorship. I excavate these pedagogies in two pivotal texts of post-dictatorship cultural production.

The first is the testimonial literary work The Little School: Tales of Disappearance and

Survival in Argentina (1986) by Alicia Partnoy. Partnoy wrote her hybrid narrative while in exile in the United States after her imprisonment in Bahía Blanca in a detention center like the ESMA. In 1999, she read selected chapters as evidence during the trials focusing

43 on this region. Though Spanish copies of The Little School informally circulated among the families of victims, the narrative was not formally published in Argentina until 2006, under the title of La Escuelita: Relatos testimoniales (Partnoy, La Escuelita 9). The second text I discuss is the film La historia oficial (trans. The Official Story; dir. Luis

Puenzo, 1985). It was developed and produced out of the efforts of the Instituto Nacional de Cine (National Institute of Cinema), and quickly became a globally circulated and

Oscar-winning film. While I recognize that the different mediums of these texts account for important differences in their representational strategies and interventions, I discuss both the reading audiences of The Little School and the film audiences of La historia oficial as learners.42 Doing so allows me to foreground the pedagogical frameworks that these texts work within and, as I will argue, purposefully mobilize.

My contention is that, through these texts of distinct forms, origins, and circulation, Partnoy and the filmmakers of La historia oficial each stage a praxis of what

I call “willful learning.” Willful learning is an aesthetically imagined practice of learning that asserts itself against the pedagogical structures of violence through which the dictatorship consolidated and sustained its power. In contrast to a pedagogy premised on the recentralization of authority, what I call “instruction” in the context of discussing the dictatorship, these texts both represent and make space for what educators would recognize as learner-centered, decolonial practices that distribute and decentralize the authority of memory, truth, and history.43 I read willful learning both in and of these two

42 I discuss my theoretical framework for doing so in the introduction of this dissertation. See, in particular, my discussion of Rancière’s essay “The Emancipated Spectator” at the end of the introduction’s second section. 43 In this sense, my examination of “willful learning” is a reversal of the pedagogical tropes explored in the genre of the dictator-novel (see González-Echevarría’s The Voice of the Masters [1985]). The space of this dissertation limits my engagement with this genre at present, but my theorization of “willful learning”

44 texts in relation to one another and across the formal-vertical and formational-horizontal axes of meaning: I read for the willful learning represented within the texts; and I explore the way these texts safeguard the capacitates of their audiences for willful learning. When read across these axes, willful learning becomes a point of parallax between a formal, textual feature of resistance to the instructional framework of the dictatorship and, from a shifted viewpoint, a formative mode of resilience for those living under a hegemonic instructional regime—a regime that has the capacity to appropriate forms of resistance toward its own ends. What we see when we look across the axes that these texts inhabit, then, is what we see in the space of “Que los lápices sigan escribiendo”: an aesthetic praxis that semantically resists the violent instruction of the dictatorship within the resilient space it makes for audience learning as playful creation.

The adjective “willful” strategically reclaims the pejorative, semantic meaning of the term as a designation of disobedience to authoritarian banking pedagogies. My usage also refers to “willful” in the sense of the act of willing something into existence. In this sense, “willful” acknowledges the way in which the will of prisoners and the public at large was the object of the dictatorship’s instruction. However, my focus on willful learning, as distinct from this instruction of the will, underscores the inefficaciousness of such instruction, while still emphasizing the need for audiences to sustain willfulness in the face of that instruction. Within this register of willing, I also argue that Partnoy and the filmmakers of La historia oficial advance the presence of willful educable subjects as a means of willing the recognition of other human rights subjectivities than those

invites future comparative studies between features and strategies of the “learner narrative” of the dictatorship and those of the dictator-novel.

45 delineated by the dictatorship and, as Kelly Oliver critiques, within liberal modes of recognition.

What I identify as willful learning is derived from Sara Ahmed’s work on “willful subjects.” I place her work in conversation with Idelber Avelar’s work on the ways in which post-dictatorship literature has resisted narratives of healing and triumph over narratives of defeat. Ahmed’s women-of-color feminist framework enriches the work of scholars like Marjorie Agosín, Elizabeth Jelin,44 Doris Sommer, and Diana Taylor, who have written on the ways in which the well-being of the Argentine national body, as

Taylor writes, was “built by blows to the female/feminized body, both literally and rhetorically” (12). As a continuation of the Latin American nation-building rhetoric of the nineteenth century, the dictatorship’s politics and national myths were founded upon the idealization of a particular version of femininity and the feminization of all undesirable social groups. The disciplinary, instructional structures of the dictatorship, too, were structured through this misogynist violence. María Sonderéguer observes that “violence against women in the dictatorship had a disciplinary function” (Carbajal). Lizel Tornay and Victoria Alvarez have discussed how women’s narratives of the gendered violence they suffered during the dictatorship were silenced in part because of the nature of the post-dictatorship reconciliation laws and are only now being more attended to more closely (Tornay and Alvarez).45

44 See, for example, Agosín’s edited volume Women, Gender, and Human Rights (2001) and Jelin’s essay in Gender Politics in Latin America: Debates in Theory and Practice (1997). 45 It’s worth noting that all violence is gendered, though Tornay and Alvarez refer to the violence described in these silenced women’s narratives as gendered violence.

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This history invites us to examine willful learning as a counter-pedagogy to the instruction of the dictatorship in terms of feminist resistance. One of the crucial elements of this resistance is the insistence on making space for the unrepresentable, the absent, the unspeakable, and—to borrow Avelar’s word—the “ruins” left by the dictatorship’s violence. The renowned activist work of the Madres and Abuelas of the Plaza de Mayo powerfully embody this insistence. These women brought their private anguish and mourning into the patriarchal public sphere and global attention to the crisis in Argentina, and, as Diana Taylor suggestively phrases it, their activist performance continues to be

“instructive” to human rights activists (184). The counter-pedagogies advanced within

The Little School and La historia oficial reveal and resist instructional structures of passivity and silence, of elision and erasure. They respond to Mario Di Paulantino’s call,

“in contrast to any ‘abiding lesson’ for reconciliation,” to develop an “ethical reading practice that interrupts the immanence in any claims to representing ‘truth’ and ‘justice’”

(165).46 My reading also contributes to the growing number of studies on the intergenerational dimensions of cultural memory.47 The willful learning depicted at the crux of these memory texts adds a branch to the genealogy of Argentina’s memory work in light of what Jordana Blejmar and Cecilia Sosa have identified as a turn to the provocative and playful styles of the post-dictatorship generation of writers and artists.48

Just as the exhibition “Que los lápices sigan escribiendo” staged on the fortieth

46 Di Paulantino’s usage of the term “immanence” as an indication of manifest authority is distinct from my engagement with the term “imminence” in the remainder of this chapter. 47 See, for example, Susana Draper’s Afterlives of Confinement: Spatial Transitions in Postdictatorship Latin America (2012); Ana Ros’s The Post-Dictatorship Generation in Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay: Collective Memory and Cultural Production (2012); and No hay mañana sin ayer: batallas por la memoria histórica en El Cono Sur (2013) by Steve J. Stern, et al. 48 See Blejmar’s Playful Memories: The Autofictional Turn in Post-Dictatorship Argentina (2016) and Sosa’s “Humour and the descendants of the disappeared” (2013).

47 anniversary of the golpe del estado, this strain of willful learning has been a crucial feature of Argentine recovery and the “re-learning” of human rights.

At the center of this willful learning, then, is the legacy of the symbolic-historic figure of the revolutionary student of the Long Sixties and a feminist pedagogy of resistance. Trauma scholar Roger Simon and his colleagues have argued that remembrance is fundamentally pedagogical because “it is implicated in the formation and regulation of meanings, feelings, perceptions, identifications, and the imaginative projection of human limits and possibilities” (Simon et al., Between Hope and Despair

20). Literature and the “imaginative projections” of film are similarly implicated in these formations. Each of these two texts works within the intersecting memorial spaces of the literary and the pedagogical to imagine modes of human rights learning in which audiences are fully embodied learners rather than implied, passive recipients of information and moral doctrine.

Jacques Rancière’s essay, “The Emancipated Spectator,” helps illuminate how a testimonial narrative and a film can have a shared underlying pedagogical framework. I apply Rancière’s discussion of the spectator/learner to that of the reader/learner because, though reading and viewing rely upon different cultural mediums and account for important distinctions in how meaning is made (as Diana Taylor has effectively argued

[2003]), the underlying pedagogical relations between audience, author, and text are the same. Rancière observes that a theory of spectatorship as viewing presupposes that viewing is the opposite of knowing, and that the goal of theatre (including the innovations of Brecht and Artaud) is to close the gap between viewing spectator and knowing performer/playwright/theatre worker in order to transform the viewing spectator

48 into a knowing one (2, 8). This is, he observes, “the very logic of the pedagogical relationship” (8). In turn, he argues that “[e]mancipation begins when we challenge the opposition between viewing and acting; when we understand that the self-evident facts that structure the relations between saying, seeing and doing themselves belong to the structure of domination and subjection” (13). Similarly, within The Little School and La historia oficial, willful learning is staged as an aesthetic-pedagogical act of emancipation.

While the willful learning theorized through these texts is a counter-formation to the instruction of the dictatorship, I want to comment on how it is also in conversation with, but distinct from, the framework of pedagogy seen within Argentina’s truth commission report and trials.49 CONADEP’s report, Nunca más, codifies the systemic and enduring violence of the military through the term “pedagogy,” asserting that “la pedagogía del terror convirtió a los militares golpistas en señores de la vida y la muerte de todos los habitantes del país” (“the pedagogy of terror converted the military regime into the masters of life and death for all those living in the country”; “Prólogo del ‘Nunca

Más’: Edición 30”). This usage presents pedagogy as a system of hierarchical omnipotence, a centralization of authority within a defined “learning” space, in this case, of the nation. It is helpful to understand pedagogy here in the sense of Henry Giroux’s definition of “public pedagogy.” He characterizes public pedagogy as a crucial process of

49 The International Center for Transitional Justice reports that there have been over thirty truth commissions since the 1980s. Truth commissions, sometimes called truth and reconciliation commissions, are “non-judicial inquiries established to determine the facts, root causes, and societal consequences of past human rights violations” (“Truth Comissions”). Argentina’s (1983–1984) was notable for being the first formed by a freely elected government to successfully submit its report (the first to convene was in Bolivia, but this commission never completed its report). The Argentinean commission was influential in the formation of subsequent commissions, including in Chile (1990–1991), South Africa (1996–1998), Guatemala (1997–1999), Canada (2008–2015), and Greensboro, North Carolina in the United States (2004–2006).

49 society-building that, through culture and its institutional forces, “produce[s], organize[s], and distribute[s] particular identities, values, ideas, and commonsense understandings regarding the self, the relationship of the self to others, and particular conceptions of what it means to be an agent and to engage a specific version of the future” (Giroux 64). One of the mandates of the work of the truth commission and public trials was to shift the terms of the narrative and discursive processes that do what Giroux refers to as the

“production,” “organization,” and “distribution” of that communal knowledge. If the pedagogy identified by the CONADEP report is one of authoritarianism, then a different one altogether has been needed to rebuild a healthy democracy.

But the pedagogies that emerge from the mandate of the truth commission and trials do not necessarily represent a full shift from those of the dictatorship. Education and transnational justice scholars have written about the dangers of erasing other histories in the name of rewriting a narrative of national solidarity, albeit solidarity against state terrorism. Denise Bentrovato identifies this tendency as the usage of a “pedagogy of truth” to impose a façade of national unity and consensus that takes the place of reconciliation and nation-building (410). Looking at the context of Rwanda (a context that exemplifies how the contemporary nation state, in its very ontology, remains a colonial form), she observes that this pedagogy encourages a performance of mastery over official discourse and normative lessons of morality, silence, and self-censorship rather than an arrival at “truth” through critical inquiry and evaluation (403). An example of this “pedagogy of truth” in Argentina can be seen in former president Carlos Menem’s proposal to demolish the Ex-ESMA completely in order to replace it with a monument to

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“national reconciliation” (Di Paolantonio 185). The plan was blocked by rights groups and forensic anthropologists. For this reason, Di Paulantino interrogates

the ethical limits of using truth commissions and trials as a pedagogical means of

telling and cultivating “a national narrative that can effectively foster discursive

solidarity and liberal memory [after an episode of state-sanctioned violence]”

(Osiel 1997, 283). My concern here is that representing the violent event through

a national conciliatory lesson ultimately relies on a way of understanding without

facing loss, without confronting how this event challenges, or exceeds, the

symbolic economy of the “we.” (165)

Di Paolantonio’s critique highlights the way in which the truth commissions and trials can actually share a pedagogical foundation with that of the dictatorship, that of a re- centralization of authority that requires citizens to be passive, obedient, reconciled vessels of the nation. Hernán Vidal argues that these juridical structures require that

“opponents and enemies must consciously abandon and condemn to oblivion vindications that may have originally given rise to conflict. These betrayals are not actually forgotten and eventually reemerge to compound alienations and conflicts newly established” (17).

He further identifies the political goal of national reconciliation as the means through which the state discretely masks and maintains socio-economic control through a careful public catharsis of truth (as in the case, for example, when the Nunca Más report became best-selling beach reading [Kaplan 137]). He reminds us that “power does not function well unless its disciplinary potential is relegated to the background,” and that state power will constantly hide itself in new ways to “renovate its mythical energies” (Vidal 37).

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Under these legal structures, education works as a disciplinary tool of normalization because it is that background.

I argue, however, that Partnoy and the filmmakers of La historia oficial represent persistently willful figures of resistant learning to this mode of instruction, while also positioning the potential willful learning of their audiences as a source of resilience within institutional narratives of power that perpetually don different masks. In what follows I first discuss the historical figure of the student of the Long Sixties in Argentina, a figure who would become the symbol of the subversive enemy of the military junta. I comment on the violent, misogynist instruction of the dictatorship itself, in part by examining a Proceso-era junta memo that delineates the qualities of this subversive symbol as both destructive and generative. From there, I theorize willful learning against this instruction by reading The Little School across the axes of form and formation; I then examine these valences of willful learning in La historia oficial. I conclude with a discussion of how willful learning has a role in global discourses that deploy instructional benchmarks of human rights comportment in order to justify structural violence. Reading how these texts theorize pedagogy and resist the instruction of the dictatorship offers us greater insight into the representational and formative work of culture in defining human rights and their subjects. The figure of willful learning that I excavate here plays a role in post-Sixties remembrance and human rights literature across the Americas, as the subsequent chapters of this dissertation demonstrate.

Perhaps most urgently, the willful learning in and of The Little School and La historia oficial invites us to turn the pedagogical question inward and re-examine how we turn to literary work in the teaching and learning of human rights and their violations.

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These texts call for a shared mandate of aesthetic and pedagogical spaces to shift the terms on which we understand how audiences learn about human rights. Willful learning demands a radical kind of risk, one that requires space for both utopian possibilities and the destruction that can yield new growth. Luis Paredes artfully captures this risk in his encomium to his generation of the Long Sixties:

Alas for our generation!

It is this passion

that drifts and shipwrecks us on dry land

It is

a whirlwind and, perhaps, a seed-bed.

(qtd. in The Little School 33)

In Argentina, these whirlwind and seedbed qualities of the Long Sixties student became synonymous with those of the enemies of the state; they signified a fundamental ineducability that disqualified their bearers as subjects of human rights. General Ramón J.

Camps, who oversaw dozens of detention centers and was responsible for hundreds of disappearances, explicitly considered those deemed “subversives” as nonhuman. He presents the re-education of this inhumanity as a rationale for stealing the children of

“subversives,” asserting that “it wasn’t people that disappeared, but subversives. . . .

Subversive parents educate their children for subversion. This has to be stopped” (Fisher

102). Camps’s rationale exemplifies the ways in which state recognition of human rights is predicated on a specific metric of educable subjectivity. Willful learning is an orientation against this metric of educability, which enables the structural violence through which dictatorship maintained power and forestalled global human rights

53 intervention. The Little School and La historia oficial exemplify that to be a willful learner, a willful reader, and a willful viewer of human rights is to risk shifting the terms on which human rights subjectivity is claimed and recognized.

THE BAD STUDENTS OF THE LONG SIXTIES IN ARGENTINA

There are two salient qualities of the historical students of the Long Sixties in

Argentina that I want to draw out in the next few pages. These qualities developed into the cultural and symbolic metrics of the “bad students” to and of the dictatorship. They are in an alignment with “Third World,” anti-imperialist, de-centering political and educational movements and an embodiment of imminent and utopian cultural mores that were seen as threatening to a patriarchal family (and family-as-nation) structure. Just as the “reorganization,” or public instruction, of authority once responded to these qualities, so, in turn, are the qualities formative of the symbolic figure of willful learning in La historia oficial and The Little School. Since these qualities develop in various ways in the coming chapters of this dissertation, I focus on them with some depth here before discussing how they are manifest in La historia oficial and The Little School.

The late 1960s-1970s were characterized by a wave of global protest movements in response to violence and oppression on local, national, and international scales. Young people and students in the First World (in France, England, and the United States, for example) were both affecting, and being affected by, Third World movements against oppression, corruption, colonialism, and neo-imperialism (including in Vietnam, Mexico,

54 the Czech Republic, the Philippines, and South Africa).50 Within the nominally First

World nation of the United States, the Black Power, Civil Rights, Puerto Rican and

Chicano movements aligned their causes with those of global Third World liberation movements. While the Argentine government was positioning the country as a

“modernizing” nation, Argentine youth actively cultivated a political alignment with

Third World movements. Third World nations were part of a geography defined by decolonization; this resonated with young people in their desire for Latin America to shake off the neocolonial and neoimperial dependencies on Western “centers” —the

United States in particular. In her extensive study on youth in Argentina, Valeria

Manzano writes that “thanks to the success of the Cuban revolutionary process, [young people were] ever more conscious of the opportunities of liberation” (Age of Youth

169).51 Argentine youth proactively aligned themselves with the independence efforts of

Third World non-Western nations, as well as with the Black Power and other Third

World movements in the United States (Walter 178-79). This “thirdworldism” was fundamental to the formation of the New Left and the radicalization of students into militant groups (Manzano, “Tercer Mundo” 85); it also aligned the symbolic figure of the student with these movements’ decolonial frameworks of knowledge.

Even more broadly than their “thirdworldism,” Argentina’s student movements had a history of advocating for decentralized authority and actively crafting the structure and curricula of their educational institutions. A pivotal moment in this history was in

50 Though the terms “First World” and “Third World” are, by contemporary standards, inaccurate and imprecise, I use them because they reflect the global rhetoric of the Long Sixties. 51 She further argues that Argentina would fit within the geography of the Third World because the concept “stressed the scope and intensity of social oppression, which required the systemic use of violence that usually came in the form of military rule” (169).

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1918, when student advocates launched a university reform movement that determined the nature of university governance in Argentina and in Latin America as a whole for decades to come.52 From that time, Argentine schools and universities were pedagogical spaces where learning, organizing, and resistance to authoritarianism went hand in hand.

By the time of the Juan Carlos Onganía dictatorship (1966–1970), students were openly critical of what they called educational “encyclopaedism,” in which they felt they were trained to become empty receptacles parroting facts (Manzano, Age of Youth 48). They were (unsurprisingly) reading Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Eduardo

Galeano’s Venas abiertas, and Marxist texts like Marsha Harnecker’s Conceptos elementales del materialismo historico (174). For these reasons, educational and intellectual institutions were targets for military and government intervention. During the

Proceso, the expulsion and arrest of teachers and students and the disappearance of writers, artists, and intellectuals such as Haroldo Conti and Antonio Di Benedetto became part of the dictatorship’s instructional campaign against these modes of decentralized and non-hierarchical education. The dictatorship saw this as the “subversive takeover” of communism and Marxism among the youth and workers of Argentina (CADHU 118–20).

The junta intended to reinstate traditional patriarchal order by “controlar y prevenir toda actividad de tipo ideológico que nos aparte del modo de vida cristiano” (“control[ling] and prevent[ing] any ideological activity that impedes us from living with Christian values”) (121). 53

52 On the impact of the 1918 movement, see especially Mario Toer’s El movimiento estudiantil de Perón a Alfonsín (1988) and Richard Walter’s Student Politics in Argentina: The University Reform and Its Effects 1918-1964 (1968). 53 The role of the Catholic Church in the Proceso is contentious; at times they are seen as full accomplices of the military junta and at times they are seen as complicit through their ambivalence (See Gustavo Morellos’s recent book, The Catholic Church and Argentina’s Dirty War for an examination of these

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The longer history of ongoing student activism, combined with students’

“thirdworldism,” contributed to the groundswell of student, political, and guerrilla groups in the 60s, many of which had a national presence by 1970 (Manzano, Age of Youth 5).

These groups ranged from the more militant Montoneros and Ejército Revolucionario del

Pueblo (the People’s Revolutionary Army) to the Juventud Peronista (Peronist Youth) and the Unión de Estudiantes Secundarios (Secondary School Student Union).54 These groups were drawn to Peronist policies and politics, where they saw a dedication to worker protections, female empowerment, and social justice.55 Beginning with the

Onganía regime, student and labor Peronist activism was often met with government violence, as in the case of the “Noche de bastones largos” (“Night of the Long Batons”) in 1966 and the Cordobazo uprising in 1969. The economic and structural objectives of the Plan Condor also relied upon the oppression of worker movements and unions, eroding workers’ rights and protections through legislation and taking violent action against those involved in unions (CAHDU 139-151). Thus, students’ vocal alignment with Third World politics against Western nations exacerbated the government’s antagonism toward any association with these groups. In the extremity of their response,

debates in depth). Nevertheless, these “Christian values” stood in contrast to the growing liberation theology movements in other places in Latin America during this era. Rigoberta Menchú, for example, identifies as both Maya and Christian, and asserts that her coming-into-consciencia developed through her involvement in community-based Catholic organizations (Franco 214). 54 An important caveat here is that students were made up primarily of urban youth; Manzano notes that in Argentina, urban youth represented around 80% of those individuals between eighteen and twenty-four (Age of Youth 14). 55 Peronismo, or Peronism, refers to the Argentine political phenomenon and labor-focused party that originated with the twenty-ninth and forty-first president, Juan Perón. Perón was elected president in 1943. His wife Eva became a beloved figure in the public eye, known as a champion of the poor and the founder of the first female political party. Perón was ousted in a coup and went into exile until 1973, but the Peronist party continued to develop in his absence. He returned in 1973 after a Peronist party victory and was elected again, but he died a year later. He was succeeded by his wife, Isabel Perón, who was in power at the time of the military coup in 1976. For a more extensive history of Peronism, see Matthew B. Karush and Oscar Chamosa, The New Cultural History of Peronism: Power and Identity in Mid-Twentieth-Century Argentina (2010) and Huge Gambini, Historia del peronismo, volumes 1–3 (1999; 2001; 2008).

57 the dictatorship elided the distinctions and fractures among the groups to create an instructional symbol of the “bad student” for the population as a whole.

The national symbolic figure of the “bad student” also embodied the sense of imminence that was part of global youth culture of the Long Sixties. Diana Sorensen describes this quality as “possibility [that] is entwined with the spirit of utopia, which is central to the cultural and political imagination of the sixties” (2). Similarly, Beatriz Sarlo characterizes the politics of the era as “youthful,” made manifest through a tone of

“imminence” in which students felt they were active protagonists in something that was always “about to happen” (Sarlo, “Cuando la política” 16).56 This sense of imminence manifested in Argentina, as it did in Europe and elsewhere in the Americas, through expressive developments in youth culture (new sexual mores, the rise of rock music, modernized fashion). These cultural developments cohered with Argentine student activism into symbolic and tangible contestations of traditional authority.

Argentina mirrored many Western countries in that notions of state authority were rooted in a patriarchal hierarchy. Doris Sommer, building on Michel Foucault and

Benedict Anderson, has traced how the formation of the Latin American nation was developed through erotic imaginaries of reciprocal love, based on the fulfillment of traditional gendered roles. Sommer argues that these “foundational fictions,” classic

56 Sarlo elaborates on this youthful imminence on the following page of her essay: “El juvenilismo de los setenta se apoya en el sentimiento de inminencia: se aproximan grandes cambios, que exigen tareas gigantescas por su riesgo físico y su osadía, que sólo pueden ser encaradas por aquellos que no mantienen compromisos subjetivos, espirituales o materiales con nada del presente o del pasado. . . . La idea de inminencia es afín con este despliegue de energía juvenil” (17). (“The youthfulness of the ’70s is based on the feeling of imminence: bringing big changes ever-closer, ones that call for enormous feats of boldness and physical risk, that can only be faced by those who do not maintain subjective, spiritual, or material commitments to the present or the past. . . . the idea of imminence is closely related to the deployment of youthful energy.”)

58 romances, “fill[ed] in a history that would help establish the legitimacy of an emerging nation” on strictly gendered metaphors of marriage and family (Foundational Fictions

7).57 In the first half of the twentieth century, educational policy in Argentina was based on a familial model in which the state assumed the role of the child’s protector (Carli

317-22). This model demonstrates Ahmed’s observation that, within such patriarchal structures, “the will of the child” was the “central medium” for the transmission of authority (62–64; my emphasis). Though new views emerged on childhood and family in the ’60s and ’70s, the dictatorship was a throwback to these older models of control over the child’s body as a manifestation of her will (Ghiggia 205). In their efforts to “re- organize” and re-establish that patriarchal authority, the military would attribute undesirable feminized traits to their enemies and prisoners. This attribution operates within what Kelly Oliver, Maria Lugones, and Peggy Phelan, among others, have discussed as the gendered binaries of Western epistemology and liberal recognition in which any marking of gender at all is a marking of feminization; white masculinity is the invisible norm, and any attention to or presence of gender at all indicates a deviation from that norm: “[h]e is the norm and therefore unremarkable; as the Other, it is she whom he marks” (Phelan 5).58 Militant student groups, too, upheld these misogynist norms for their female members in their strategies of resistance; as combatants, women’s bodies were

57 Interestingly, her work both echoes and elaborates on Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger’s contemporaneously–published The Invention of Tradition (1992), which posits a similar thesis about the development of national traditions within the British Commonwealth. 58 In addition to Phelan’s Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (1993), see especially chapter five, “False Witnesses,” of Oliver’s Witnessing: Beyond Recognition (2001) and chapter three, “Spectral Presences,” of Rosemary Jolly’s Cultured Violence (2010). I further address how these attributions of gender operated within the military’s enactment of (gender) violence upon prisoners in my discussion of Partnoy’s The Little School.

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“de-feminized” through dress that downplayed desirability and eroticism, which made claim to a guerrillera femininity that embodied masculine heroism (200; Taylor 34).

The alchemy of militant activism supporting the ideas of Third World liberation and the sense of imminent contestation within youth culture focused the violent, misogynist instruction of the dictatorship, and speaks to why youth occupy a significant amount of space on the lists of the disappeared. Students would ultimately make up a full fifth of the disappeared, with the vast majority of disappeared people being between the ages of 16 and 30 (CONADEP). Authoritarian state power is predicated on maintaining the existence of enemies. The military’s 1977 operational memo, “Capacidades del

Enemigo” (“Capacities of the Enemy”), demonstrates the way in which the dictatorship enumerated the qualities of this enemy as a reflection of Long Sixties youth culture: its alignment with decentralized expressions of collectivity, and its capacity to generate and galvanize new expressions of this alignment.59 These qualities are punctuated by the actions—the verbs—that begin each metric:

3. CAPACIDADES DEL ENEMIGO

a. Accionar sobre la población

1) Incrementar el desarrollo de sus campañas de acción sicológica, con CG en el

1er y 2ndo nucleamiento, en desmedro de la actual conducción gubernamental,

FFAA, FFSS, y PP, aprovechando circunstancias coyunturales (actual empleo de

59 This document is part of the “Orden de Operaciones 9/77: Continuacion de la ofensiva contra la subersion durante el periodo de 1977” (“Operational Order 9/77: Continuation of the offensive against subversion during the period of 1977”). I retrieved it from the “Metologia Represiva” (“Repressive Methodology”) archival section of the Centro de Estudios Legales y Sociales (Center for Legal and Social Studies) in March, 2016.

60 la Fuerza – “ejército opresor”), crítica situación socio-económica y errores de conducción en los distintos ámbitos.

2) Crear y/o incrementar frentes y organizaciones colaterales en todos los

ámbitos, en particular en el gremial y estudiantil, con prioridad en el ler nucleamiento.

3) Incrementar los actos de terrorismo selectivo, en particular sobre empresarios, dirigentes gremiales, principalmente en el 1er y 2do nucleamiento.

4) Intensificar la acción de superación entre las bases y sus patronales, en el

ámbito gremial y afectar subsidiariamente la producción, en particular la industrial.

5) Explotar la situación político-socio-económica que vive el país, provocando movilizaciones de masa que configuren una situación de inestabilidad social.

6) Realizar propaganda oral y escrita, utilizando los medios de difusión que apoyan su accionar en forma encubierta.

3. ABILITIES OF THE ENEMY a. To influence the public

1) To increase the development of their campaigns of psychological action, with

CG in the first and second association, to the impairment of state management, the FFAA, the FFSS, and the PP, taking advantage of current circumstances (the current usage of the Force as “oppressor-army”), the critical socio-economic situation, and errors in operation of distinct areas.

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2) Create and or augment collateral fronts and organizations in all areas, and in

particular among unions and students, with priority in the first association.

3) Increase acts of selective terrorism, in particular on businesspeople, leading

union leaders, principally in the first and second association.

4) Intensify the separation between the bases and their employers, in the sphere of

the union and subsidize production, particularly industrial production.

5) Exploit [and explode] the socio-political-economic situation the country is

currently living in, provoking mass mobilizations that form an unstable social

situation.

6) Perpetuate oral and written propaganda, utilizing diffusion methods that

support their actions in a covert form. (Centro de Estudios Legales y Sociales, box

3)

The verbs they use to prove the presence of such an “enemy” (accionar, incrementar, crear, intensificar, explotar, realizar) evoke—in their infinitive form, no less—the infinite potential for “the enemy” to disrupt and disperse centralized authority and the creative, critical, and transformative potential. In other words, these verbs denote the identifiable metrics for the “bad student” (and potentially “bad student”) targets of the dictatorship’s campaign of public re-instruction.

These metrics can also be understood by examining the verbs that went missing when the dictatorship shifted national education policy. In 1983, when the junta was in its nadir, Argentine education scholar Juan Carlos Tedesco co-published a report titled El

62 proyecto educativo autoritario: Argentina 1976–1982 (The Authoritarian Education

Project: Argentina 1976–1982). While his report details the ways in which education in

Argentina was adversely affected by the regime, it also emphasizes that it is impossible to disentangle that effect from the larger social authoritarian pedagogy of the regime. He observes that

en el caso argentino, la crisis universal de la enseñanza media se enmarca en la

crisis social nacional. De este modo, los problemas tienden a indiferenciarse y no

resulta posible ver con claridad si se enfrenta un problema pedagógico, un

problema político o un problema cultural.

in the case of Argentina, the overall crisis of secondary education is framed within

a national social crisis. So the problems tend to be indistinguishable, and it is not

possible to clearly see if we are confronting a pedagogical problem, a political

problem, or a cultural problem. (Tedesco 67)

Tedesco asserts that during this era, pedagogical practices were seen above all as necessary for mediating social comportment and distributing certain “valores, conductos, y conocimientos” (“values, conducts, and knowledges”), all in the service of consolidating a traditional authoritarian pedagogy of societal discipline, hierarchy, and order (18, 20). Tedesco offers a telling example of this shift when he compares two versions of a statement from the declaration of the Consejo Federal de Educación

(Federal Council of Education), one from August 1976—at the very inception of the dictatorship—and the other from December of 1980—four years into the dictatorship.

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The first version declares the goal of education to be the formation of a

“protagonista creador, crítico, y transformador de la sociedad en que vive, al servicio del bien común . . .” (“creative, critical, and transformative figure of the society in which he lives, at the service of the common good”). The version from 1980 was adjusted to declare the goal of education as “la formación integral, armónica y permanente de cada hombre, en función de sus fines esenciales, la propia vocación y el bien común . . .”

(“the comprehensive, harmonic, and permanent formation of every man, toward the function of his essential ends, his own vocation, and the common good…”) (31).

Tedesco’s comparison exemplifies the dramatic shift from envisioning the pedagogical process as one that cultivates criticality and creativity to one that safeguards a sustained, centralized societal order. As Tedesco observes, “Como puede apreciarse, en el segundo texto el proceso hizo desaparecer las menciones a los aspectos críticos, creadores y transformadores” (“As you can see, in the second text the [regime of the National

Reorganization Process] made the mention of critical, creative, and transformational aspects disappear”) (31, my emphasis). Disappeared, along with the bodies of the “bad students” who were the critical, creative, and imminent transformers of the nation.

Within Tedesco’s observation, we see an evocative instantiation of the relation between conformity to particular qualities of educable subjectivity and the recognition of human rights. Furthermore, the junta’s adjusted syntax for the mandate of education in

Argentina disquietingly echoes the UDHR’s discernment of the human dignity safeguarded by human rights. In the face of public instruction built upon falsification and disappearance, it is understandable that a figure of willful learning would be both urgent and compelling for authors and artists. For example: in the detention and torture center

64 below the officers’ club at the ESMA, disappeared prisoners were forced to work in a false documentation laboratory. Such fabricated documents would include passports, police and university credentials, and titles for business and properties robbed from the kidnapped and granted to military leadership (CONADEP).60 In the introduction to this chapter, I addressed General Ramón Camps’s comments on another horrific element of this campaign of fabrication: the babies of women who gave birth at the detention centers were stolen and given to military families to be raised under their new order and to erase the counter-histories of their parents, the so-called “enemies of the state” (Fisher 102).

This violence is part of a long, ugly, colonial tradition of states removing children from their “marked” families and placing them in “unmarked” families and schools. It is a branch of the gendered, hierarchical binary that establishes masculinity as the unmarked norm from which any presence of gender is a deviation. This hierarchy enables the notion that fathers have equal or more claim over children than mothers who “provide not only her egg and womb also nine months of her life and the pain of childbirth” (Oliver 122).

Thus, the gendered framework in which the traditional notion of the “father figure” exists enables the state, as this nominal father figure, to rationalize stealing the babies of women in order to incorporate them into a dominant order. In Argentina, this domination through fabrication and disappearance was rationalized—rhetorically and tangibly—by the peril of deviant educability, of the “bad students.”

60 The excellent podcast Radio Ambulante tells the story of a prisoner forced to work in this lab in the episode “El fotógrafo/ The Photographer.” He secretly (and willfully) reproduced the photographs he had to develop for these falsified documents. He later turned those reproductions over to CONADEP to aid its investigation and used them to testify against the junta during the trials.

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It is here that Sara Ahmed’s examination of “willful subjects” helps us understand how these qualities can cohere into an aesthetic and pedagogical formation that signals resilience within and resistance against the violation of human rights that are enabled by these discourses. Ahmed uses the historically pejorative coding of willfulness to open possibilities of being and relating beyond normalized social structures. Willfulness has a long history of both attribution and mobilization by figures labeled as deviant (most often queer and female ones). For Ahmed, willfulness not only indicates a disagreement with what has been willed by others, but also with “what has disappeared from view,” a questioning that disturbs what is accepted and brings that acceptance into disturbance

(16; my emphasis). I want to link the qualities of the “bad student” with the way in which

Ahmed argues that willfulness is connected to a social pedagogy that is rooted “in the affective rather than the intellectual” (124). I define affect as the way in which we account for the presence or existence of a feeling through its physical manifestation.

Though affect can exist irrespective of the ways its presence or absence is coded as an emotion, affect is indicative of an “emotional state or reaction,” a “physical state or condition,” “an influence or impression,” and “the capacity for willing or desiring”

(“Affect,”, my emphasis). When affect becomes connected to a proof of existence, manifest in the body rather than the intellect, it becomes a target of state and, I would argue, instructional regulation (Butler 39).

We can see a parallel here with the qualities of post-dictatorial literature that

Idelber Avelar identifies. For Avelar, these literary works resist—are willful to—a hegemonic neoliberal narrative that wants to forget that “the present is . . .the product of a past catastrophe” (3). Their resistance occurs through a “topology of affect” (22, my

66 emphasis). For Avelar, affect is something that traverses the boundary of the self and that, unlike feelings or emotions, does not solely reside or show itself in “the psychology of a nation” (22). In other words, affect moves within the liminal spaces of public and private. Avelar’s own employment of affect in the aesthetics of post-dictatorial mourning echoes the implicit metrics of the “bad student”; he discusses his usage of the term by directing his readers to the etymology of the word, which carries the meanings “to have an effect upon” and to “strive for” (237). The willful, affective, imminent learner not only feels but proves, not only accepts but does, not only lives in the present but imminently opens possibilities for a different future.

The connection among willfulness, post-dictatorial aesthetics, and pedagogy manifests itself in a phrase prominent among student activists as proof of their commitment: “poner el cuerpo,” to put one’s body to the cause. Manzano explains that this phrase captures how imminent and revolutionary feelings coalesced in the image of a youthful, resilient (typically male) body: “In this culture the ideal combatant was one that had surpassed daily proofs of activism, which were also the markers to assess his consciousness. The body was made the carrier of consciousness” (Age of Youth 218).

What began as a rallying cry transformed into a horrifying reality under the military dictatorship in which student bodies were indeed put to the cause of erasure. In Spanish,

“proof” is prueba, a word used to indicate both a test of aptitude and a justification, or claim to truth. Within the phrase “poner el cuerpo,” the student body is connected to instances of proof as textual or performative indicators of learning.

Despite the historic masculine hegemony of the student movement, we see in the notion of “poner el cuerpo” a nascent pedagogy in which the body, rather than strictly the

67 mind, is the proof of learning—a seed shared with the decolonial, queer, and feminist pedagogies of thinkers such as Gloria Anzaldúa. Recognizing willful learning as a decolonial and feminist framework of pedagogical resistance affirms the violent, misogynist nature of the instruction of the dictatorship and emphasizes the crucial role these frameworks of knowledge have in Argentina’s recovery. In articulating a practice of willful learning, The Little School and La historia oficial are aesthetic-pedagogical spaces that shift the terms of what, who, and how one is educable, and thus recognizable, as a subject of human rights.

LEARNING IN AND WITH THE LITTLE SCHOOL61

In her early twenties, Alicia Partnoy was a politically active university student invested in improving living and working conditions for the people of her country. She explains that “like most of the younger generation, I thought that the [Peronist] movement bore the seeds of change to socialism” (Partnoy, The Little School 12). In

1977, she was kidnapped from her home in Bahía Blanca and placed in a detention center that the guards referred to as “The Little School.” The nickname was one of many examples of the military’s sardonic joke of calling their concentration camps by instructional names; the Nunca más report names “La Universidad,” “El Reformatorio,”

“Escuelita de Famaillá,”and the “Escuelita” of Neuquén as other examples of secret detention centers, all reflective of the instructional model drawn from the reformatories of the previous centuries (CONADEP). Partnoy spent three and half months there before

61 I primarily refer to the text with its initial English title, The Little School. I use La escuelita when I am addressing a distinction in meaning or phrasing in the Spanish narrative or discussing something that only appears in the Spanish narrative. When discussing the concentration camp itself, I refer to the Little School or la Escuelita without italicization.

68 being released to “another place,” where she remained a disappeared person under slightly better living conditions (Partnoy, The Little School 15). After six months, she “re- appeared”—her family was informed of her whereabouts, and she could speak to them, but she remained a political prisoner. In 1979, she “was taken directly from jail to the airport, where I was reunited with my daughter. Some hours later, we flew to the United

States” (16–17). Partnoy believes that the Argentine government granted her an exit visa for the United States, where she did not speak the language, instead of Spain, where she had originally applied, because they knew that she was outspoken (Hintz 322).

Nevertheless, she learned English and worked with the feminist-focused Cleis Press to publish The Little School: Tales of Disappearance and Survival in 1986 (323).62 The text includes appendices of names and descriptions of the prisoners and guards, judicial testimony fragments, and a map of the detention center. Partnoy’s prose can be characterized by urgent imperative to teach while maintaining a strong poetic and sometimes comical voice. Together, these qualities evince an insistence on representing the fullness of the humanity of the prisoners.

Though beautifully and even humorously told, The Little School vividly depicts the military’s horrific acts of public silencing and instruction via the female body. Alicia and her fellow prisoners undergo the so-called “instruction” of the School, built on gender violence, torture, and humiliation.63 This chapter focuses on an aspect of feminist resistance that Partnoy highlights through The Little School: the reclamation of learning

62 Later reprintings of The Little School would be published under Cleis’s human-rights focused “Midnight Edition” series. 63 Partnoy read two chapters of The Little School, “Graciela: Around the Table” and “Nativity,” as evidence for the trials of military leaders who participated in the abduction of babies born in prison and the murder of their parents.

69 away from the passivity and embodied silence demanded by the misogynist instruction that propelled the violence of the dictatorship. Partnoy mobilizes the metaphors established by the nickname “Little School” not only to teach about the structural and personal violence of the dictatorship, but also make space for readers to grapple with how to be resistant learners within the violent instructional frameworks of classroom, public, and cultural pedagogies. We can think of this strategy in the vein of what Doris Sommer calls “feminist distancing language,” or a “feminine estrangement,” in the aesthetic tradition of Sor Juana, Teresa de la Parra, Rosario Castellanos, and Rigoberta Menchú

(318–319). Partnoy declares herself “una mala alumna,” a “bad student” of the school’s instruction. Her poetic testimonial work performs alternative modes of knowledge- building within that violent instruction. The “bad student” of The Little School registers on two levels. The first is an acknowledgement of the military’s view of her—coding her as a “bad” student activist who merits imprisonment and reconditioning into passivity.

The second codes her as a “bad,” or failed prisoner, a “bad learner,” who resists the

School’s instruction; this version is a badge of honor—to be a “bad student,” a “willful learner,” is to build resilient forms of self and community within the space of the structural and personal violence of the School where, as Partnoy writes, “professors use the lessons of torture and humiliation to teach us to lose the memories of ourselves” (The

Little School 18).

I begin by approaching my reading of The Little School through a formal, vertical analysis: I examine how the text represents practices of willful learning as resistance within the misogynist and masochist instruction of the dictatorship. Even within the formal space of her text, Partnoy depicts the potential for willful learning to be

70 appropriated by hegemonic narratives. I then engage in a horizontal, relational analysis by discussing how Partnoy invites us to map that literary figure of the willful learner onto the figure of the reading audience in relation to the pedagogical exigency of her testimony. I argue that, in risking this relation, Partnoy proposes willful learning as an enduring strategy of resilience within authoritative frameworks of instruction. Finally, I discuss the implications of this reading for critical work on testimonial literature.

Testimonio is itself a willful genre, and The Little School, unlike its namesake, wants its readers, its learners, to stay willful.64

Partnoy’s explicit declaration of her status as a “bad student” of The Little School appears in the additional introductory chapter of the Spanish translation, La escuelita, which was not published in Argentina until 2006.65 The title of the chapter adopts the familiar phrasing of a fairy tale: “Había una vez una Escuelita…” (“There once was a

Little School”). That utopian beginning, indicative of a moralistic tale to come, turns to horror as the first sentence is completed with the phrase “…de muerte y destrucción” (“of death and destruction”) (Partnoy, La escuelita 25). Partnoy makes it clear in this chapter that she wants the pedagogical metaphor of the School to frame how her readers, especially her Argentine readers, engage with the legal and social pursuit of human rights. She stresses that this Little School, like many others in Latin America, “enseñan a fuerza de tortura y humillaciones a perder la memoria de uno mismo y a que restemos la

64 Because The Little School has often been situated in critical work as a testimonio rather than as testimonial literature, I engage my own discussion of The Little School with the debates on testimonio. John Beverly’s foundational scholarly work on the genre, Against Literature (1993), asserts that testimonio usually engages with testimonial writing more broadly and can include a variety of texts, “for example, oral history, memoir, autobiography, chronicle, confession, life history, novella-testimonio, documentary novel, nonfiction novel, or ‘literature of fact’” (71). 65 The edition published in Argentina includes an additional appendix, “lucha por la memoria, la verdad y la justicia” (“the fight for memory, truth, and justice”). This appendix provides a timeline of Argentina’s tribunals, reports, and other efforts toward justice and recovery after the dictatorship.

71 voluntad de lucha por cambiar la educación de la injusticia” (“forcibly teach you through torture and humiliation to lose your memory and minimize your will to fight to change the education of injustice”; 25). She describes the ways in which the instruction of the

School did so by diminishing and disappearing prisoners’ sense of existence as much as possible, through blindfolds and by being cut off from history, communication, and loved ones. “Pero fui mala alumna” (“But I was a bad student”), she declares. “Por eso es que hoy les abro la puerta” (“That is why today I am here to open the door for you”; 25).

With this metaphor, she establishes The Little School as a physical space of entry and thus positions her readers in relation to her text as fully-embodied learners.

She mobilizes the metaphor of the School’s instruction to galvanize her Argentine audience, over twenty years removed from the dictatorship at the time of the text’s publication, to continue to resist the legacy of isolation, silence, and fabrication that was foundational to that instruction.

Tratemos de aflojarnos la venda que nos han puesto sobre los ojos, espiemos por

el resquicio cómo transcurre la vida en La Escuelita. Por la sangre de los que

conocieron las aulas del terror antes de que lo fusilaran, por el dolor de los que

están en este momento, soportando las clases de la infamia, sumémonos a la

fuerza para borrar de la faz del continente todas las Escuelitas, para que los

crímenes no queden impunes y entonces puedan los pueblos castigados alzarse en

maremotos, ocupar lo que es suyo y ser felices.

Let us try to loosen the blindfold they have put over our eyes, and peek through

the crack to see how life in The Little School went by. For the blood of those who

came to know the classrooms of terror before they were executed, for the pain of

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those who are, at this moment, bearing their disgraceful instruction, let us join our

strength to erase all of the Little Schools from the continent, so that these crimes

do not remain unpunished and then the devastated communities will rise up in

tidal waves, take up what is theirs and be happy. (26)

She invites her audience to take on the qualities of utopian-driven willful learning as a way of maintaining a position of criticality in the face of hegemonic, historical narratives of violence and erasure. Her call to maintain willfulness in memory of those who no longer can thus frames the Spanish edition of the text. It expands upon the warning that concludes the prologue of The Little School’s initial publication: “Beware: in little schools the boundaries between story and history are so subtle that even I can hardly find them” (The Little School 18). This warning exemplifies Partnoy’s own capacity for turning to irony and humor as a means of narrating the sober occurrences of her time in

The Little School. With this warning, Partnoy alerts her readers to a need to constantly cultivate their critical imaginations—even within the aesthetic-historical space of her own text. At the same time, following Rosemary Jolly’s discussion of South African women who refuse to testify to their own sexual assault, we might read Partnoy’s refusal to assert her authority over the narrative as a way of refusing to revisit and reify the violence perpetrators enacted through an authoritarian, gendered instruction that stigmatized her as a “mala alumna” (Jolly 92, 96). In either case, this statement points to how Partnoy is making space for, and even inviting, the willfulness of readers against her own voice as the authoritative teacher of The Little School.

Within this introduction, Partnoy forges her pedagogy through the generative tension between potential meanings of “bad student.” In the vignette “Latrine,” Alicia

73 tells of how male guards would escort women to the School’s bathroom and while there humiliate and abuse them. Such trips were occasions for a pornographic spectacle of female sexuality as passivity and shame (Jolly 95). On one such trip to the latrine, a guard named Loro forces Alicia to bump into a male prisoner. Loro then makes a show of scolding the male prisoner and demands that Alicia punish him. “‘Slap his face. He’s got bad manners. Make him pay for his bad manners,’ said Loro, placing my still untied hand on the other prisoner’s cheek. I caressed his face” (The Little School 31). “Bad manners” translates to “maleducado” in Spanish, or literally “badly educated.” The text bridges the label of “bad student” placed on Alicia’s friend with her willful interpretation of the guard’s intended instruction through a framework of gender violence: Loro demands that

Alicia perform her feminization as subjection to him, that she convert herself into the tool of his feminization of (and thus his domination over) the male prisoner. Loro reflects the junta’s misogynist tactics of dehumanization by fabricating the notion that feminized prisoners “both required and enjoyed the hand that beat them,” but Alicia disrupts the terms of the guard’s voyeurism with a loving, validating gesture of touch (Taylor 6). The guard threatens, “If you don’t hit him, I’ll hit you!,” but Alicia narrates that instead, “I gently patted my friend’s face” (31). She continues, telling her audience that, “Loro slapped me twelve times. It almost didn’t hurt. I remembered that Hugo had been tortured more than I had…I wasn’t going to hurt a pal” (31–32). In shifting the affect of the gesture from a slap to a caress, she suppresses the pain in view (though not completely) and draws out the camaraderie and solidarity that have, like these prisoners, been disappeared by the junta. With this gesture, she tilts the disobedience and “bad learning” of maleducada into an assertion of her and Hugo’s selfhood and humanity.

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Survivors have written that play and simulation were strategies of resistance for prisoners of the junta (Calveiro 116). Aside from being important elements of self- directed learning, play and simulation are related to the “critical, creative, and transformational” goals that Tedesco observed disappear under the dictatorship’s educational policy (31). Partnoy brings these scenarios together in the way The Little

School maps the resistant pedagogy of Alicia and her fellow prisoners. She introduces this junction as another element of maleducada in “Latrine,” when the guards force prisoners to simulate the children’s game el trencito. In the ’50s–’70s, the Argentine

Ministry of Education recommended that the game be part of standard early education curricula (Ghiggia 204). The game involved two pupils grasping each other by the shoulders and yelling “choo choo” in a train around a yard. Maria Ghiggia writes that while el trencito is an instrument of oppression, it also opens a space for resistance (206).

Alicia and the other prisoners use this moment of physical solidarity to open an intimate, private space of liberation by exchanging gestures of encouragement and “enjoy[ing] the feelings of my legs running,”) even within the isolation and public instruction of the concentration camp (Partnoy, The Little School 31).

Partnoy builds on this aspect of willful learning in the vignette, “A Conversation

Under the Rain.” Here the reader participates in a similar moment of private liberation between Alicia and an imprisoned friend. Under the cover of the rain falling against the broken window, the women simulate a “social visit” within the prison walls, trading snippets of news about their loved ones and ideas about yoga to soothe their bodies (69–

71). When they are discovered by the guards, the raindrops transform into a violent deluge of water torture. Alicia’s previously first-person narration transforms into a

75 distant, third-person voice in this chapter, indicative of the trauma she experiences in relation to the event. The voice describes how the same skill of playfully simulating a social visit while in prison helps her shield herself from some of the torture’s intentions.

The voice says, “Chinese torture66 under a roof leak! Black humor made her shield thicker and more protective. Drops of water sliding down her hair dampened the blindfold on her eyes. Threats and insults sliding down her shield shattered into pieces on the kitchen floor” (72).

In locating the kitchen as the space of her torture, Partnoy signals how the kitchen, like the women’s lavatory, has traditionally excluded men; as Jean Franco observes, for women the kitchen was “a physical reminder of limits but also the space where they exercised power. It was linked to women’s honor and bodily integrity” (206).

Alicia’s willful response again frustrates the gendered violence of the military’s instruction, aligning the integrity of the kitchen floor with the integrity of her own body.

“She thought he was mad because she had neither cried nor pleaded for mercy, because she had not even trembled. She thought he was upset because in spite of the blows and restraints, in spite of the filth and torture, both women had had that long and warm conversation under the rain” (73). These final lines link the valences of Alicia’s willful formation as a “bad student”: that of her disruption of the school’s misogynist instruction, which tries to teach a particular kind of feminized response, and that of her reclamation of the feminist “learning” that is possible within the School.

66 The phrase “Chinese water torture” has an Orientalist history indicating “exoticism” rather than anything historically deployed by the Chinese. Its origins are Europoean, and the term entered popular vernacular in part through the American Marvel comic Fu Manchu.

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While working through the generative tension of the “bad student,” The Little

School also alerts us that these acts of resilient learning demand a radical kind of risk that can go terribly wrong. Partnoy chooses to highlight this, no less, in a vignette that directly addresses aesthetics called “Poetry.” While sitting with a group of new prisoners, Alicia recites a poem she has written about a beloved stream that was filled in near her house—a dirge for a lost “compañero.” The text interlaces Alicia’s recitation of this poem with the torture of her husband; the guards interpret the poem as evidence of Alicia’s knowledge of other subversives and want the name of this “compañero.” At the end of her recital,

Alicia witnesses the guards beating one of the new prisoners whose blindfold is loose.

“When I hear the muffled moan,” Alicia concludes, “I feel guilty. Instead of reciting poems I should have explained to the new prisoners…I should have told them that at the

Little School we are beaten whenever our blindfolds are loose” (106). This scene stages the problems with interpreting literature through a strictly formalist framework (a vertical axis), even within the world of The Little School. Both the guards’ misreading of the poem and Alicia’s inattention to the relational space in which she was reciting her poetry are appropriated for instructional violence. The danger of maintaining a “blind spot” to the pedagogical frameworks of human rights is staged in The Little School around the symbol of the blindfold.

Throughout the text, the loose blindfold is a subversive yet dangerous space of possibility for Alicia and the prisoners; it both enables and curtails their vision and with it their critical and imaginative faculties. The erratic window into The Little School that the blindfold provides for the prisoners is echoed in the fractured and varied focalizations of the vignettes. In the scene I described in the previous paragraph, Alicia blames herself for

77 being a “bad student” of what she had learned about the precarious liberation of the blindfold. In doing so, she links the nascent resistance in the spaces of the loose blindfold and her poetry to their potential appropriation as tools for violence. While the scene reads as Partnoy’s declaration that poetry is impossible under the instruction of the School (she writes that “when the flesh of poetry is anesthetized, it is impossible to build poems” [The

Little School 104]), I would argue that the scene also warns us that it is impossible to detach aesthetic creation from its political and pedagogical power. The scene connects the precariousness of the blindfold’s potential to enable agency with the self- determination and collectivity of creative, poetic expression. This connection demonstrates the stakes of resistant learning in The Little School, while evincing the risk demanded by it. The blindfold exemplifies what Judith Butler calls a constantly rupturing frame for apprehending “grievability,” which “precedes and makes possible the apprehension of the living being as living” within a politically induced condition of violence and oppression (15, 25). Through the motif of the porous blindfold, Partnoy links her insistence on grievability to her insistence on willful learning as a means of exposure and critical intervention into the normativity of such frames (Butler 26). For

Partnoy, her aesthetic-testimonial space, signaled by the blindfold, is also a space of teaching and learning that can foreground the tensions, gaps, and contradictions of maintaining resilience under such conditions.

Partnoy’s later poetic work suggests that she continued to regard safeguarding willful learning as the shared responsibility of aesthetic and classroom spaces. One powerful example of this is a poem from her 2005 bilingual collection, Volando bajito, or

Little Low-Flying, titled “Clases de español / Spanish Lessons.” The poem alternates

78 between the formulaic structure of a Spanish language classroom and the fragmented, free-flowing narration of the survivor’s testimony. Partnoy alternates between different tenses and conjugations of ser (to be) as a way of imagining a scenario in which her generation had not been ravaged by death and trauma. At the end of the lesson, the speaker alerts her students that:

si fuera mi demanda: if my demand:

“que la justicia sea” “that justice be”

al menos escuchada… had been heard…

no hubiera sido, it wouldn’t have been

alumnos, necesario necessary, my students,

inquietarlos con este par de clases to disturb you with these couple of classes impregnadas del tufo de la muerte. impregnated with the stench of death.

(Volando bajito 24)

The finality of death infuses these final lines with the injustice of murdered mothers and their stolen newborns. By locating this injustice as the formal end of these “Spanish lessons,” Partnoy emphasizes the way in which those murders were couched within a public instructional mandate. In the absence of systemic justice, the aesthetic space of poetic testimony safeguards the willful learning that maintains one’s ability to work toward justice. I agree with Kate Dunn’s reading that the figure of the teacher-poet in this poem establishes the form of testimonio as a classroom (654). I would go further, however, and say that the students the speaker’s class and the readers of Partnoy’s poem,

79 and of her testimonio, become one figure. In resisting the hermetic conceptualization of narrative and poetic art through a figure of willful learning, Partnoy’s text also resists a hermetic and obedient conceptualization of art’s audiences—of its learners.

Similarly, The Little School invites its readers to consider ways in which they are

“bad students”—not empty vessels to be filled with instruction, but actors within a pedagogical space, attentive to its essential fragments, elisions, and ambiguities. Maria

Ghiggia has argued that Partnoy’s text presents the concentration camp as a space of ambiguities that “allows for the consideration of survival strategies and acts of solidarity”

(192). In the chapter “Telepathy,” Partnoy foregrounds how the ambiguity within the disciplinary space of the School allows for conflicting knowledges to exist together.

Alicia describes attempting to get in touch with her family through the imaginative capacities of her mind. She reflects that

[i]t was in the afternoon, after I woke up alarmed because I couldn’t remember

where I had left my child for her nap. I opened my eyes to a blindfold that had

already been there for twenty days. That reaction made me realize that at the

edges of my mind I still believed I was free.

If only I could reach further. If I wanted, I could find a way to control my mind,

to make it travel, escape, leave. It was an order. I received so many orders… (The

Little School 50)

The Spanish edition of this section in La escuelita utilizes language that further emphasizes Alicia’s capacity to resist and revise the ambiguous space of the School’s instruction. She writes that:

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Fue la misma tarde en que me desperté sobresaltada tratando de acordarme dónde

había dejado a mi hija aquel mediodía, para abrir los ojos a una venda que me los

tapaba hacía ya veinte mediodías. Ese sobresalto me dio una idea. Mi mente

todavía tenía uno de sus bordes en libertad. ¡Si pudiera estirarse hacia afuera!

Querer es poder. Si yo quiero, puedo controlar mi pensamiento, hacerlo viajar,

huir. ¡Salir! ¡Te lo ordeno! A mí me dan tantas órdenes…

It was the same afternoon that I woke in a fright trying to remember where I had

left my daughter that afternoon, shocked to open my eyes to a blindfold they had

covered me with for what was now twenty afternoons. This shock gave me an

idea. My mind still had one of edges in freedom. If only I could stretch toward the

outside! To want to is to be able to. If I want, I can control my thoughts, make

them travel, flee. Get out! I order you! They give me so many orders… (La

escuelita 47)

What I want to emphasize here is the surprise Alicia feels at the gap between her body’s location and her mind’s location; it reminds us that the Cartestian divide between the mind and the body that upholds liberal notions of human dignity is a fabrication. Her surprise also indicates that despite the attempts of the guards to establish a fully- authoritarian instructional environment, the School remains a space of ambiguity. The sentence, “Querer es poder,” evokes this ambiguity through the dual meanings of poder as “power” and “can,” as in “the ability (and permission) to do something”; taken together, these registers of meaning signpost the imminent potential for change that characterized a “bad student” of the Long Sixties. Within this ambiguity of poder,

Alicia’s orders to herself are able to claim the same space as those that the guards give

81 her. The text invites us to consider the multiplicity not only within the space of the concentration camp it depicts, but also within its own pages. That multiplicity of knowledge, ability, and power exists within the willfulness of her own readers, a willfulness that can sustain pedagogies of justice beyond her pages and beyond the dominating public instruction of the dictatorship.

But Partnoy’s invitation to embrace readers as willful learners presents a challenge to scholars invested in amplifying the voices of testimonial literature. The potential willfulness of a reader may need to come into conflict with the exigency of testimonial literature to be believed. Though definitions of testimonios are fairly fluid, the critical consensus is that testimonios narrate an experience from a politically or historically marginalized person whose words move between “portraying her or her own experience as an agent” and speaking for the experience and for the collective experience of the person’s community (Yúdice 44). Testimonios recount an atrocity that this community has lived through while linguistically and formally disrupting the structures of power behind that atrocity and its heretofore-untold story. The genre is known for subverting traditional representative structures and categories of literary work and their associated indicators of truth and authenticity.67 There is a rich body of work on both the aesthetics of testimonio and its historical role in seeking justice, particularly when it comes to testimonio’s imperative to destabilize prevailing notions of “true versions” of events.68 More strictly categorized, testimonios such as Miguel Barnet’s Biografía de un

67 This subversion is reflected in Osvaldo Bayer’s prologue to La escuelita, in which he easily and purposefully moves between calling the text a “relato”—which can refer equally to “story,” “account,” or “report—and a “documento” (“document”) (Partnoy, La escuelita 11). 68 On the challenges facing the genre and the scholarship addressing the texts associated with it, see René Jara and Hernán Vidal’s Testimonio y literatura (1986) and Georg M. Gugelberger’s collection, The Real Thing (1996), which includes essays from John Beverly, Barbara Harlow, and Fredric Jameson. One can

82 cimarrón (Biography of a Runaway; 1966), Domitila Barrios de Chungara’s “Si me permiten hablar…” (Let Me Speak; 1977), and Me llamo Rigoberta Menchú y así me nació la consciencia (I, Rigoberta Menchú; 1983) are mediated through “an intellectual” typically from a First World country. This person tends to help organize the narrative and allows the speaker to “maintain authenticity” in relation to their political work and membership in a marginalized group with which, as Barbara Harlow describes, an

“antiauthoritarian relationship” is maintained (72). Testimonio both tells and performs forms of decolonial knowledge, and as such it is an important genre in relation to human rights writing and discourse. Though testimonial writing has been a tradition in Latin

America since the days of colonization, the genre of testimonio is generally considered to have begun in the ’60s (Nance 167–168).69 Much of the critical history of the genre has been dedicated to amplifying the voices of testimonial speakers and to sorting out what, exactly, a testimonio is.

The issue at the root of this debate, for which “willful learners” present a dangerous prospect, is the question of how we as readers position ourselves in relation to a work of testimonial literature. How do we gain knowledge from it, what kind of knowledge we are gaining, and what do we do with this knowledge? The danger of willful readers of testimonio was played out in the Rigoberta Menchú / David Stoll controversy. In his exposé, Rigoberta Menchú and the Story of All Poor Guatemalans

(1999), Stoll compares Menchú’s account of events in her testimonio with his own

also turn to the more recent work of Nora Strejilevich (2006) and Ana Forcinto (2016), as well as a series of dissertations that place these questions in a comparative contexts or evaluate the pedagogical and institutional legacy of testimonio. 69 Miguel Barnet’s Biografía de un cimarrón (Biography of a Runaway Slave) (1966) is widely considered to be the foundation of the genre, though Kimberly Nance makes the case that Carolina Maria de Jesus’s Quarto de despejo / Child of the Dark (1960) should be recognized as the first testimonio.

83 collection of local testimony and documentary sources of the war and human rights violations in Guatemala. He maintains that Menchú’s testimonio is a dangerously romanticized political tool whose widespread acceptance as testimony, in a juridical sense, raises concerning questions about academic standards. The controversy sparked a sustained and extensive dialogue among literary scholars, anthropologists, universities, and human rights activists. At its root, however, this controversy revealed one of the risks of transposing a legal framework of analysis onto human rights literature in order to galvanize action: it positions literature as an instrumental, banking pedagogical space, and elides the multitude of ways audiences might learn from a text’s aesthetic strategies.

Nevertheless, the extent to which the reader of a testimonio accepts a text as an authoritative account matters a great deal when testimonial authors are purportedly attempting to galvanize their readers to combat the atrocities they tell. The readership of testimonio itself is assumed to be made up of educated individuals who are living in a setting far from that being described. Linda Craft observes that testimonio is intended to galvanize this readership that, in one way or another, has contributed to, or benefited from, the marginalization of people whose narratives the readers consume (5). Critics such as Beatriz Sarlo have argued that this imperative overshadows the historical validity of the work. Alicia Partnoy herself responded to Sarlo in defense of testimonial subjects by arguing that the reader of the text of a survivor must place herself in a pedagogical relationship of trust with that text.70 Readers of testimonial literature are learners charged

70 This debate played out in Partnoy’s 2006 PMLA article, “Cuando vienen matando: On Prepositional Shifts and the Struggle of Testimonial Subjects for Agency.” In one telling example of Partnoy’s critique of Sarlo’s position, she writes in reference to the testimony of another survivor, Pilar Calveiro: “[For Sarlo,] Calveiro’s academic training legitimizes her findings: Calveiro can be trusted once she sheds her authority as a survivor to embrace that of a doctoral-dissertation producer (Sarlo 122)” (Partnoy 1666). One can see,

84 with real ethical, actionable responsibilities as witnesses to the dynamic and dialogical nature of the work’s narrative testimony (Dunn 657). This charge, and the high stakes of its fulfillment or lack thereof, has presented a conundrum for literary scholars and teachers of this genre regarding how to address the gap between the “implied reader” and the potential willfulness of “real reader” (a willfulness embodied, for example, in David

Stoll).

The critical work on The Little School reflects a broader tendency for scholars to manage the risk of willfulness by approaching implied readers either as fully passive recipients of a text and inhabitants of the speaker’s experience or as potentially disobedient. For example, van Heudsen asserts that La escuelita directs readers to identify with the prisoners because of a shared experience of blindfolded vision that the narrative form evokes in the reader (12). This is a common way of talking about the potential effect of a narrative strategy on readers, but it overlooks the experiences readers already bring to the text, while erasing the incommensurability of prisoners’ experiences.

On the other end of the spectrum, we might consider Louise Detweiler’s insightful analysis of how The Little School’s gaps in narrative coherence invite active decoding on the part of the reader. Yet her analysis becomes troubling when she characterizes this strategy as “a preemptive strike” against potentially disobedient readers (Detwiler 62).

Her assertive language is understandable given her goal of advocating for the victims depicted in the text and its galvanizing imperative, but she bizarrely falls into echoing the authoritarian pedagogies Partnoy depicts. Like the echoes of the public instructional

even within this critique, the way that Partnoy is thinking about the distinctions between different kinds of authority and the way in which that authority is mediated through distinct pedagogical spaces and forms.

85 framework of the dictatorship in the (re-)educational framework of the public trials I discussed in the introduction to this chapter, both of the strategies for managing the learning of implied readers rely on a parallel pedagogical banking framework premised on passivity and obedience.

Kimberly Nance’s more recent work on testimonio, and on The Little School in particular, takes a step out from this framework by advocating that testimonios be read in the realm of deliberative speech. Deliberative speech is rhetoric that encourages critical thought; deliberative testimonios, she explains, invite critical engagement rather than rather than delicate veneration. She asserts that the deliberative rhetorical strategies that authors use in testimonios encourage readers to think critically about both the world and their own role in combatting injustice (23). In order to argue for this shift in the expectations of testimonial criticism, she turns to a pedagogical framework. She asserts that “deliberative testimonio finally does offer something to its audience: neither purity nor certainties but rather lessons in how to construct, maintain, critique, and when necessary change a set of essentially contestable foundations that help to decide what to do at each of those points of decision—a do-it-yourself ethics” (164). Nance’s argument implicitly recognizes testimonio as a pedagogical space and calls for criticism to turn its attention to the embodied and messy processes through which readers might (or might not!) arrive at an ideal of ethical subjectivity.

The varied strategies these scholars adopt in positioning readers in relation to testimonio reveal an underlying issue: the way that teachers and scholars establish what learning looks like determines whether a pedagogical space (including a written one) supports or disrupts hierarchies of heteronormative power. Partnoy foregrounds this

86 potential as that which determines the nature of a pedagogical relationship in her response to Beatriz Sarlo’s Tiempo pasado (2006). Partnoy takes issue with Sarlo’s argument that scholars must de-emphasize testimonial literature as positivist historical evidence, responding:

the processes for seeking knowledge, the spaces for intellectual reflection on these

matters, need to evolve. We can choose to continue training our students’

imagination and our own . . . And, as many college professors already do, we can

embrace Gloria Anzaldúa’s notion of conocimiento as ‘coming to know the other /

not coming to take her’ (45). (“Cuando Vienen Matando” 1667)

As scholars and educators invested in amplifying the voices of the disenfranchised, the question of how we engage these issues in our classrooms with our students is closely related to how we position the role of reader-as-witness to violence and atrocity in our research. In her re-positioning of the term “witnessing” as a dialogic relation of response- ability and address-ability, Kelly Oliver observes that “only a response that opens rather than closes the possibility of response is a responsible response.” (108). She reminds us that we, too, must give learners and audiences space for their own response-ability. While

I agree with Oliver’s ethical intervention, I maintain that the term “witness” does not adequately dislodge us from the banking pedagogies that are transposed from a legal framework of analysis. When Diana Taylor reflects on the deployment of “witness” as a term for the audience of a text, she demonstrates the way the term evokes this legacy, asking, “Why, I wonder, do we not have a word that adequately reflects the position of the active, yet all too human, see-er?” (25). Kimberly Nance raises the same issue with the prevalent frameworks of analysis of testimonio, observing that “it remains to be seen

87 what a fully collaborative testimonio—one in which all participants bring to bear all of the potential of their own unique positions to insist unequivocally on both the addressability and answerability of the reader—might look like, let alone what it might accomplish in the realm of social justice” (161). Partnoy does offers us an alternative word, and framework, through her exploration of maleducada in the The Little School:

“learner.” In a way that “witnessing” or “reading” might not, “learning” invites us to account for many modalities, embodied styles, and prior knowledges—for the possibilities that knowledge may develop in unanticipated ways by readers not likely to be passively obedient to the author’s intentions, while allowing that mistakes and missteps in understanding will be made. These allowances are crucial when turning to literature to galvanize audiences for human rights and social justice. Thinking of readers as learners re-embodies them, reminds us of the active and all-too-human see-ing they bring to the page, and helps prevent us— as Anzaldúa warns—from “taking” those capacities from them.

And what of the danger of this willful learner, of a “disobedient” reader? Sara

Ahmed reminds us that the gathering of willfulness, the building of its archive, is premised on hope: “the hope that those who wander away from the paths they are supposed to follow leave their footprints behind” (21). A learner’s capacity to wander away is what enables her to work against a status quo that enables politics against public welfare. Partnoy’s exploration of the tensions of maleducada celebrates willful learning as resistance to the violence of the dictatorship, while also positioning the willful learning capacity of the reader as a source of resilience under authoritarian, banking frameworks of instruction. In that sense, who else but a willful learner could be the “implied

88 audience” of a testimonio? The Little School’s lesson is that safeguarding willful learning, and the potential of our “bad students,” is a necessary ethical risk in the face of structural violence.

THE LESSONS OF LA HISTORIA OFICIAL

Though it screened during the same era as the publication of The Little School,

Luis Puenzo’s La historia oficial (trans. The Official Story) 71 is a different kind of text making a different kind of intervention in human rights public pedagogy. Partnoy had a long and embattled road to the publication of her book; when she published it, it was with a specialized press appealing to a particular audience already concerned with human rights abuses. Though her text served as legal evidence in military trials, Partnoy did not find a broader audience in Argentina until twenty years later. La historia oficial, on the other hand, had the full backing of the government film project. When it was first released in the ’80s, it surpassed 1.7 million ticket sales in Argentina and earned the country its first Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 1986 (“El reestreno de ‘La historia oficial’”).72 Despite these distinctions in medium and development, the filmmakers of La historia oficial also engage with the pedagogical frameworks of authority in history and remembrance by representing figures of willful learning.

71 Emily Tomlinson cites John King using the title The Official Version, instead of The Official Story, as the translation of La historia oficial (Tomlinson 224; King 96). The slight difference between “version” and “story” captures the way the multitude of meanings contained in the Spanish word historia gets somewhat lost in translation. “Version” enhances attention to the linkages between the politics of the dictatorship and the history (and historiography) taught within Alicia’s classroom. One can imagine that “version” resonates more with foreign audiences accustomed the rhetoric of newspaper accounts. “Story” still contains a reference to this newspaper rhetoric while doing more to emphasize the narrative elements of the dictatorship and the processes of re-democratization and remembrance. 72 After two further re-releases, the film stands as one of the ten most-viewed films of all time in Argentina (“El reestreno de ‘La historia oficial’”).

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La historia oficial is the story of a middle-class woman, Alicia (Norma Aleandro), who embodies the norms touted by Argentina’s traditional patriarchal society. Her comfortable life benefits from her husband’s (Héctor Alterio) close business ties with the military regime and its U.S. allies. Over the course of the film, Alicia must come to terms with the truth that her adopted daughter, Gaby (Analia Castro), is the stolen child of a disappeared couple. Alicia’s trajectory as a character is communicated through educational motifs; she is a programmatic, by-the-book history teacher who must unlearn what she has learned in order to accept the truth about the nature of her country’s history and her complicity within it. The film represents learners not only as those inside the diegetic institutional space of Alicia’s classroom, but also as those within the pedagogical space of the public sphere; as the protagonist and purported “stand-in” for audiences,

Alicia traverses both spaces. Alicia tells her students on the first day of her class, “La historia es la memoria del pueblo” (“History is the memory of the people”), an ethos that contrasts starkly with the life she lives when audiences meet her. Over the course of the film, Alicia becomes someone who seeks other knowledges that run counter to the

“official” historia, knowledges from public sources that she deems, at first, unacceptable in her own history classroom. By the end of the film, as Jessica Stites Mor phrases it, “the main character is transformed from an unsuspecting accomplice into a responsible citizen” (98). Argentine audiences watch Alicia shift the locus of her locus of her learning from the authoritarian, institutional knowledge upheld in her classroom to the public, embodied knowledge represented by the Madres of the Plaza de Mayo. At the same, global audiences, in turn, watch a representation of Argentine contrition and national didacticism.

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Much of the analysis and discussion of La historia oficial, given its subject matter and its wide reach, has focused on the way in which the film works as an object of public pedagogy. David William Foster identifies this pedagogy as a quaint “Sunday school lesson in terms of sin and grace inscribed in terms of the political process” (49). Other scholars echo his dismissal, calling the film a melodrama that ignores the suffering of those who were actually tortured or a sell-out that paints the dictatorship with soft, airbrushed Hollywood aesthetics to create a representation of atrocity that is palpable for a foreign audience (López 148–49; Torrents 95, 108; Falicov 128). These critiques reflect the kind of spectatorship-learning discussions by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, who argued that film is a technology of capitalism designed to defraud the masses, commodifying the art form so that it is infected with “sameness” and cannot possibly have historical or political urgency (117).

On the other end of the critical spectrum, scholars have argued that the film creates a confessional space, allowing “the Argentine audience a form of collective catharsis, enabling them to experience, in public, emotions that had remained private during the years of the dictatorship” (Falicov 125; King 224). These ideas reflect Walter

Benjamin’s optimistic ambivalence about the loss of art’s “aura” in the age of mechanical reproduction that, while risking the loss of local knowledge, can allow this

“emancipated” art, untethered to tradition, to be brought into new scenarios and combinations of viewers (224). This “untethered” quality allows film to provide space for collective memory work across and beyond geographically-rooted communities. These critics see La historia oficial in the way that bell hooks frames the pedagogical

91 possibilities of film, which is to “provide a shared experience, a common starting point from which diverse audiences can dialogue about these charged issues” (2).

More nuanced analyses of the film also evaluate the representational choices of the film in terms of how it navigates a human rights public pedagogical imperative.

Sophia McClennen, for example, observes that “in portraying the tragedy of the military dictatorship through the figure of a middle-class woman and in the form of a Hollywood- style melodrama,” the film demonstrates an instance in which artists and producers make aesthetic decisions that allow the story to reach as broad an audience as possible at the expense of depicting some of the crucial features of “the story that it purports to tell”

(McClennen 111). Her reading makes reference to the proposition of Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino in their manifesto, “Toward a Third Cinema,” which is that cinema provides an opportunity to promote decolonial and antiauthoritarian knowledges through brutal aesthetics that jar audiences into becoming thoughtful, revolutionary beings. “The camera,” they declare, “is the inexhaustible expropriator of image-weapons; the projector, a gun that can shoot 24 frames per second” (Solanas and Getino 127). The violence of their pedagogy is unmistakable, though it also echoes the more militant attitudes of the youth and decolonizing movements of the Long Sixties. I would argue that Solanas and Getino share an understanding of effective cultural pedagogy with scholars who feel that La historia oficial is ineffectual because “films and literature that disidentify—that is, that interrupt the process of identification—are more effective in disturbing the spectator or reader” (Franco 247).

On the one hand, we can attribute this spectrum of valid analyses of La historia oficial to the range of perspectives in film studies on the question of the art form’s impact

92 on audience experiences. But this diversity, I would argue, is also due to the way in which the filmmakers of La historia oficial are working within multiple and competing demands of post-Proceso public pedagogy. Within Argentina, the film enters into both public and state-driven efforts at national re-education regarding the events of the dictatorship; as I discussed earlier in the chapter, these efforts often promoted some victims’ narratives at the expense of others’. Among international audiences, the film responds to the human rights educational benchmarks upheld by the Western world; the film is able to literally project itself as a learning indicator for the instructional benchmarks of global organizations of human rights, including the United Nations and

Amnesty International. During Argentina’s immediate return to democracy, the Alfonsín presidency, films tended to be designed for a “universal” middle-class audience (Falicov

124, 128). The aesthetic of the Instituto Nacional de Cine (National Film Institute) aimed at a polished and palatable Hollywood feel that uses an idea of the “middle class” audience as metric.

The implicit middle-class audience reflects the way in which La historia oficial is a “schooling site” not only for the Argentine public, but also for a hegemonic global

(primarily U.S. and European) audience watching Argentine public’s transition from dictatorship to democracy. The Institute’s director, Manuel Antín, asserted that: “The government is very much interested in supporting cinema because it considers it not just a vehicle of culture but also a means to communicate with the world, an open window to the exterior that will bear witness to the democracy that we have gained” (qtd. in Burucúa

2–3). Director Luis Puenzo wanted La historia oficial to be a far cry from the aesthetics of Third Cinema. He asserted that a Third Cinema film like Solanas’s La hora de los

93 hornos “only catches the attention of people who are previously convinced” (Boero 12).

Puenzo, in contrast, preferred to “communicate with average spectators” to build their awareness about the events of the recent past (Stites Mor 100). The film travelled the globe with a pedagogical supplement for non-Argentine audiences, a press book describing “the military regime, kidnappings, torture, and the disappearances, as well as the relevant social context” (Stites Mor 101). Thanks to these efforts, La historia oficial became a successful manifestation of a border-crossing, award-winning, public-relations cultural document Manuel Antín was hoping to circulate (Stites Mor 98; Falicov 128).

When we read the willful learning represented formally in the world of the film through a horizontal, relational lens between filmmakers and audiences, this opens up the complexity of La historia oficial as a pedagogical, relational space. La historia oficial speaks to the Alfonsín administration’s mobilization of cinema to serve as evidence that

Argentina had become democratic and learned “the error of its ways”— a performative proof of growth in response to global pedagogical benchmarks of human rights. Because the film focuses on the complicity of the Argentine citizenry, particularly middle-class individuals and business-regime higher-ups, in the disappearing of citizens and their children, one might read it as a kind of metaphorical habeas corpus being performed on a global stage that relieves the government of the responsibility of actually producing the disappeared bodies, but registers a will to do so. These national objectives can come into conflict with one another when they must be achieved at each other’s expense, but all hinge upon the issue of shifting the ground on which the instruction of the dictatorship erased the human rights subjectivity of its victims: amplifying untold stories to impact public memory, changing the minds of average spectators so that they think differently

94 about their country, and projecting a contrite and reconciliatory public to the rest of the world. Given the way in which the urgency of the diegetic learning in La historia oficial maps onto the film’s public pedagogical mandates, I approach my analysis through a closer examination of the models of learning that film itself presents.

This focus returns us to the figures of willful learning and the way in which they are derived from the qualities of the students of the Long Sixties. As liminal figures of this nation-in-progress, students—and these willful learners in particular—are at the center of this performance and performative tension of the public pedagogies surrounding the film. The juventud populating Alicia’s classroom and daily life are crucial to her transformation. Indeed, a story-within-La historia is the way in which Alicia’s students

“teach” her the institutions of public instruction that she, at first, upholds. They do so by insisting on the presence of counter-discourses of history in the classroom and by being present as unspoken figures at other critical moments of Alicia’s developing realizations about the dictatorship. Their presence punctuates the journey she takes from being an uptight, doting, and diligently cautious wife to a woman who literally lets her hair down, tells her male colleague to “fuck off just a little,” and brings a Madre face to face with her regime-associated husband in the space of her own home. The responsible citizen model she ultimately presents is someone who grapples with, considers, and even accepts public, non-hegemonic sources of knowledge.

Thus, Alicia’s transformation into a figure of willful learning opens a space for La historia oficial’s audience members to consider their own subjectivity as willful learners of human rights. In this way, La historia oficial represents a conceptualization of audience learning akin to Henry Giroux’s conceptualization of spectatorship. He re-

95 embodies spectators as learners by approaching film as an overtly pedagogical space. He argues that film is capable of “preparing students to function as critical agents capable of understanding, engaging, and transforming those discourses and institutional contexts that closed down democratic and public life” and ultimately enabling reflective thinking about “how art can contribute to constructing public spaces that expand the possibilities for pleasure and political agency, democratic relations and social justice” (688-93). La historia oficial’s lesson is not only that willful learners are educable subjects but also that willful learning itself is crucial to the public education of human rights. More specifically: through the willful learning represented in the film, filmmakers propose that ethical human rights learning—for Argentine and global audiences—entails willfulness to hegemonic demands of human rights learning from those complicit with the junta’s human rights violations.

Figure 1-2: Observing the torture. Author’s screenshot. This final point addresses, in part, why I am not focusing on the film La noche de los lápices / The Night of the Pencils (dir. Hector Olivera, 1985), a film that features the students of the Long Sixties as its protagonists. The film addresses the aforenamed events that are referenced in the interactive exhibition I discussed in the introduction to this

96 chapter. Through a combination of Third Cinema and Hollywood aesthetics, La noche vividly depicts the brutal torture of students—starry-eyed, endearing young activists—in clear shades of good and evil. Though the film focuses directly on the figure of the student of the Long Sixties, La noche seems far more invested in presenting the shock factor of the students’ victimhood. In one emblematic scene, clear shots of the protagonist, a student, stripped naked and tortured are paired with close-ups of a military figure watching over him as he screams (Fig. 2). The man is unmistakably sinister: his face looms over the screen, half covered in darkness, his eyes appearing black.

The aesthetics of the scene evoke Solanas’ “image-weapons” against an unknowing audience. One can imagine this scene being screened in a movie theatre—the man’s menacing face fills the screen, but his gaze does meet those of the viewers. I agree with Valeria Manzano’s critique of the film, which I cite here in full because, in many ways, it is a reversal of the critique levied upon La historia oficial for being “too

Hollywood.” She insightfully argues that:

since La noche de los lápices represented a lethal regime coming from nowhere to

murder idealist adolescents, viewers could feel horror but rest in peace: they had

not had “anything to do” with what they saw. But the military regime did not

come from nowhere and both built upon and heightened a widespread demand for

“order” perhaps shared in 1976 by many of the viewers of the movie. (Age of

Youth 249)

La noche de los lápices may be seen by some as a more ethical film because of its focus on the experiences of the victims of state terrorism. However, because the film borders on

97 spectacle, its representational approach can also lead audiences to recuse themselves from the greater lesson that exists beyond feeling horror and pathos for the victims that they see. More than a political jeremiad or a Hollywood morality play, La historia oficial is a film that explores the performative tensions and complexities of public pedagogies of human rights.

Within this exploration, La historia oficial locates the figure of the Long Sixties student as a source of willful learning for Argentina as a nation undergoing a transformation. Students represent liminal figures of the nation, in the sense of Van

Gennep’s transitional stage between the “previous world” and “incorporation into the new world” (21). They navigate and reorganize the public and the private, the “memory of the people” and its codification in the history of the nation. The student-figure of the

Long Sixties in particular emphasizes the bridge between the individual and the collective in public pedagogy. Manzano observes that in Argentina, as elsewhere, “[y]outh represented an in-between age and signaled a passage, thus standing for transition and movement” (Age of Youth 6). In an educational space, students represent a threshold between maintaining the knowledge of the past and expanding the knowledge of the future. Victor Turner describes such liminal entities as “neither here nor there; they are betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention, and ceremonial” (95). The role of liminal figures in La historia oficial has been noted by

Emily Tomlinson, who discusses the concept of a rite of passage in relation to Alicia,

Gaby, and the “limit situation” of the desaparecidos (219, 222). It makes sense that students as liminal figures undergoing such rites of passage would emerge as important representational anchors for a nation engaged in a massive project of re-directed human

98 rights public pedagogy. I do not mean to suggest that the limit situation of the desaparecidos and the impact of a political (and physical) environment of disappearances on the public is anything but one of unquestionable violence. I would, however, suggest that one reason the liminality of the Long Sixties student has potency in Argentine remembrance is because the student’s symbolic liminal role in the nation as a harbinger of growth and change intersects with Argentina’s historical period of liminal change.

Diana Taylor has argued that the period of the Proceso was characterized in such liminal, ritualistic terms, as “a breach (the coup), a moment of crisis or liminality (the Dirty War), and a period of supposed reintegration (reorganizacion)” (Taylor, Disappearing Acts 61).

The liminal figure of the student as a willful learner, then, offers a symbol of a new future that can depart from the reification of that violence without leaving behind its history and impact.

Once again, reading Sara Ahmed’s work alongside Idelber Avelar’s helps illuminate how the figure of the willful learner could play this cultural role. Ahmed foregrounds the willful subject’s liminal quality as part of what forges her relationship with the nation: she is “the not-yet-subject . . . the subject-to-come, the one who comes after” (123). Ahmed connects this status, which is often used to cast out those who are willfully not “in time” with such norms (such as migrants, for example) to Benedict

Anderson’s configuration of the nation as something that is experienced as synchronized time—citizens of a nation who imagine themselves together, doing the same things at the same time each day (Anderson 33). Idelber Avelar similarly foregrounds how the allegorical mourning of certain post-dictatorial literature resists the configuration of what he calls post-dictatorial national time as exclusively linear and progressive. The willful

99 learner, as a resistant, liminal figure, represents a configuration of time against that of the misogynist structure of the dictatorship’s instruction.

The importance of students’ liminality is suggestively, though subtly, established during the very opening scene of La historia oficial: the outdoor school assembly. In the first shot, the film represents the school-staged-as-the-nation, with flags hanging above the students and teachers as they sing the national anthem. An establishing shot suggests which figures in this school are more suited to a changing nation (Fig. 3): the teachers are obscured under their umbrellas while the students sing out in the open, under the rain— inadvertently echoing Partnoy’s motif of the cleansing, healing possibility of the rain in her “conversation under the rain.” The camera then pans, in close-up, across the faces of the boys we will come to know as Alicia’s “hell-raising” students, resting on Alicia as the final link in this chain of faces (Fig. 4).

Figure 1-3: A song under the rain. Author’s screenshot.

With this shot, Puenzo gives us a proleptic clue about who will be doing the teaching and who will be doing the learning in this pedagogical space.

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Figure 1-4: Singing the anthem. Author’s screenshot.

If, as Burucúa asserts, the school in the film is “an intermediate space of the nation . . . between the closeness of the family and the open, more egalitarian, space of the streets,” and it contains both the possibility for re-inscribing repression and for fostering dialogue and confronting power, then these students are established from the outset of La historia oficial as the critical actors of this space (Burucúa 132–133). Because of these students, the space of the school adopts representative capacity as one of Avelar’s “allegorical ruins,” aesthetic sites that that can erupt and re-map memory.

When viewers next see Alicia’s students, they are in a classroom, pushing, teasing, and directing ostentatious facial expressions at each other in response to Alicia’s roll call and introduction to the subject of history. Their bemused and skeptical responses to the way in which Alicia establishes her classroom’s dynamic are contrasted with their lively and engaged responses to Benitez (Patricio Contreras), the literature teacher. He involves the students in a raucous reading of a nineteenth-century novel, Juan Moreira, featuring a protagonist who was known in Argentina as a noble outlaw and gaucho folk hero. The film places the student learning depicted in this scene, infused with the grand

101 heroism of an outlaw, into even sharper focus when Alicia takes over the class for their history lesson. She ejects a student for nominally causing chaos and a hostile environment for learning when he asserts that “history is written by murderers.” Even during the scenes in which Alicia discusses her students outside of this classroom space, their disruptive natures are Alicia’s most salient point of reference, as we see when Alicia talks with Benitez about the ways in which her students are “raising hell.” Falicov cites the scene of Alicia ejecting her “hell-raising” student as evidence that “the feeling of freedom that emanates from the novel Juan Moreira is in tension with the traditional setting of the private school” (130). This tension, while establishing a relation between the military dictatorship and the national history taught in school, also establishes the students as a locus of transformational potential even within the traditional spaces of this school.

Figure 1-5: Slamming the citation. Author's screenshot. From this point, the filmmakers present the willful learning of these students as a grounding presence in Alicia’s exploration of the multidimensional meaning of “poner el cuerpo” and its connection between bodies and “proofs.” As Alicia’s transition from teacher to learner is mediated through her students, we see her shift the locus of proof

102 from the “lettered city” of institutional history to that which has generated the body of the people—those she refers to in her initial definition of history to the class.73 One of the paradigmatic scenes of this evolution occurs when her students surprise her with newspaper clippings about the disappeared pasted onto the board. The scene stages a clash between Alicia, who works to regain her authority and control her shaken emotions by yelling at her students, including one of her students who insistently reads aloud an anti-censorship essay by the journalist Mariano Moreno (whose foul-play death was being debated in a previous class). He punctuates his reading by furiously giving the citation to the essay and slamming the book shut, re-appropriating Alicia’s own insistence that her students properly cite historical texts (Fig. 5). The student’s performance in the tense space of the classroom channels an affective assertion of rebellion that is also intended to educate. This education quietly begins to affect Alicia.

Though she castigates the students in this scene, later on she protectively clutches these same clippings—the prueba of her students’ disruptive potential and of the pedagogical effect they are having of her—while she listens to her husband’s military regime colleague lambast the terrible and hopeless nature of the juventud.

The filmmakers link Alicia’s students to her transformation by placing an examination scene just after Alicia’s confessional (in which she implores her priest to

73 I nod here to Jean Franco’s The Decline and Fall of the Lettered City: Latin American in the Cold War (2002), which in turn is in response to Ángel Rama’s La ciudad letrada / The Lettered City. Franco’s work discusses the shift away from Rama’s letrados, urban intellectuals who shepherded cultural independence in colonial through turn-of-the-century Latin America, and toward what would become the damaging and homogenizing binaries of Latin America’s status as a Cold War battleground. Franco observes the way in which these Cold War agendas were reflected and contested within literary work. This work resulted in part, she argues, in a devaluation of literature within Latin America just as the international community began to recognize Latin American literary texts. While the students of La historia oficial show no signs of devaluing literature, they do re-orient its tangible, political possibilities away from Alicia’s more traditionally-rooted viewpoint of intellectualism and its relationship to literature.

103 give her “not absolution but the truth”), suggesting a kind of counter-conversion to the

Catholic Church’s ambiguous stance towards the dictatorship. Initially, the scene presents a common depiction of students taking a class exam. But Alicia’s students’ exam-taking occurs simultaneously with Alicia undergoing her own test: we see her examining a drawing of Gaby’s and trying to make sense of what, exactly, it proves about Alicia’s status as her adoptive mother. Because Alicia is rapt by Gaby’s drawing, she does not see

(or, if she does, she does not care) that the “troublemaker” is asking other students for answers that would help him game his “proof” of mastery over the version history benchmarked by the exam. In the following classroom scene, Alicia returns this graded prueba to her students. She admonishes one student, the original “hell-raiser,” for not referencing written historical material, to which he responds, “Do you only believe what you read in books?” Viewers might identify this moment as evidence of Alicia being a complicit tool of the proofs of the military’s “official story,” as some scholars have

(Cisneros 154; Gonzáles Vidal 96). Alicia, her hair now let down inside the classroom in a look she describes to Benitez as “wild,” does indeed admonish him for his willfulness, but there is a small yet monumental shift here: she still gives him a high grade (Fig. 6).

The student looks back in disbelief as she gives him a willful smirk before continuing to read the names on the students’ exams, and the student’s classmates congratulate him.

This moment is not to be overlooked as an indication of her evolution as a learner. It is a

104 moment that the students in the film have facilitated and take the time to celebrate on- screen, as if they, too, were giving her a grade within the rubric of public pedagogy.

Figure 1-6: Graded. Author's screenshot. Beyond this scene, it is the female figure of the willful learner who shepherds

Alicia at perhaps her two most crucial pedagogical turning points, both of which occur outside of the traditional institutional space of her classroom. One such moment is during the pivotal scene Alicia has with her old friend Ana, the survivor who gives an onscreen testimony of the atrocities she underwent to Alicia. When Ana was a student and Alicia’s schoolmate, she became connected with the revolutionary student practices of the era.

Ana shares her gripping testimony with Alicia in the private space of Alicia’s home, the camera closes in on their embrace, creating an environment that again echoes Partnoy’s

“conversation under the rain” in the way it subverts and excludes masculine authority

(The Little School 69-71; Fig. 7).

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Figure 1-7: Ana (on the left) tells her story to Alicia (on the right). Still from Internet Movie Database’s page, “The Official Story.” Ana’s eyes are downcast as she tells Alicia the story of what happened to her, something she had never shared with anyone prior to that moment. In contrast, Alicia’s eyes are wide open, suggesting the incipient moment of Alicia’s evolution as a learner of the atrocities of the dictatorship.

Perhaps most subtly, yet also most critically, students are present when Alicia sits down with Sara (Chela Ruíz), the Madre of the Plaza de Mayo who believes that Gaby is her biological grandchild. Alicia’s meeting with Sara is the moment when she must confront fully the proof of others’ lost children, and with that, the potential loss of her own child. The unmistakable embodied proof of the likeness between Gaby and the photograph of Sara’s daughter undermines any “official story” found in Alicia’s history books. This scene takes place in a café where female students are playing an arcade game in the background (Fig. 8). The sounds and visuals of their playing occupy the space of

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Alicia and Sara’s conversation in a way that is noticeable but not disruptive.74 At first

glance, this tableau casts students as jarring, uncaring teenagers who are in the process of

becoming but have yet to fully mature into more solemn members of society. But I would

argue that the film is making a link here between their disruptive, utopian, and playful

Figure 1-8: The sights and sounds of female students playing fill in the gaps between Alicia and Sara. Author’s screenshot. presence and Alicia’s conversion from being someone who, as she says, “always believes

what people tell me,” to someone who draws her own conclusions about the truth. This

link is not made to suggest that the students are indifferent or uncaring toward this truth,

but rather to suggest that their willful, imminent, and affective presence is inextricably

linked with learners like Alicia.

In the final climactic scene of the film, Alicia’s own body as a student of the

public sphere, who now draws her own conclusions about truth, interrupts the pedagogy

of censorship and silence exemplified by the door that her husband slams on her hand.

Low Taylor has observed the opening and closing of doors as a recurring motif in the

74 This unsettling tableau of play woven together with terror echoes the techniques of play and simulation presented in The Little School.

107 film, indicating complicity and knowledge (208). In blocking the slamming door with her hand, Alicia has, like the historic student figure, “puesto el cuerpo”75 in the name of a resistant pedagogy of truth. Quite contrary to the patriarchal nation-building romances of the nineteenth century (Sommer, Foundational Fictions 7), the film ends with Alicia leaving her home and her husband while Gaby sings to herself, softly, the recurrent song by María Elena Walsh, “in the land of I-don’t-remember.” Viewers emerge from this final scene with the sounds and images of a nation in need of revision.

The note on which La historia oficial ends reaffirms the way it is entering into simultaneous and competing pedagogical mandates within Argentina and upon a global stage. At the heart of these sometimes harmonious, sometimes dissonant pedagogical objectives is the figure of the student. Because the filmmakers position this willful learner at such pivotal points in their approach to building narrative within these competing objectives, La historia oficial ultimately suggests to its distinct audiences that an individual or collective project of human rights pedagogy is incomplete without a reflection on what kind of learners we are when we undertake the process of understanding human rights.

STAYING WILLFUL

Through the figure of the willful learner, Alicia Partnoy and the filmmakers of La historia oficial foreground and intervene in the instructional framework sustaining the dictatorship. The affectiveness and intimacy represented in the learning scenes in The

75 Puesto is the past participle of the verb poner. It references the student phrase “poner el cuerpo”—to “put one’s body to the cause”—discussed in the second section of this chapter.

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Little School and La historia oficial are an antidote to what Diana Taylor has called

“percepticide,” a public pedagogy of fear and erasure that “blinds, maims, kills through the senses” (Disappearing Acts 124). But the salient lesson of these texts is the urgency for audiences to maintain willful learning as resiliency in the face of public instruction that re-appropriate the terms of human rights in order to justify violence.

One compelling example of this appropriation is the public performances of the

“good women” of the dictatorship, an almost unsurprising dialectical response to the “bad students” and “bad women” of the dictatorship represented by the Madres (and by our two Alicias). These women were “urged and coerced” by the military to publicly embody their role within the patriarchal order, and would march the streets with signs and pins playing on the call for derechos humanos, human rights, in Argentina: “los Argentinos somos derechos y humanos” / “Argentines are human and right” (Taylor 78). This slogan became the military’s response to a supposed “campaña antiargentina,” or “anti-

Argentine campaign,” in other words, to the international attention they were drawing from human rights groups thanks to the work of the Madres. Under the global spotlight as hosts of the 1978 World Cup, the military used public funds to disseminate this phrase on car decals, “para ser ‘paseadas’ por la ciudad” (“to be ‘paraded’ around the city”) alongside a radio campaign (“Somos derechos y humanos”).

Like the assertion of General Camps that “subversives” must be prevented from educating their children, the justification for this appropriation is made on pedagogical terms. In a gesture of closing this chapter, and of directing our attention to the hemispheric nature of these pedagogical terms, I offer an example from the annals of the

U.S. Senate in which they use pedagogical human right rhetoric to justify the sale of arms

109 to the Argentine military junta. In 1981, a year that marked the crest of the violence by the Argentine military dictatorship, an amendment to an arms deal reached the United

States Senate floor expressing senators’ desire for the Argentine military government to release information about the disappeared and account for its political prisoners

(“Congressional Record: Senate”). The reach and impact of the human rights work of activists Jacobo Timmerman and the Madres of the Plaza de Mayo are made evident by the reference to them in the speeches of Ted Kennedy and Claiborne Pell during the debate. Senators arguing against the amendment, including the then-Chairman of the

Foreign Relations Committee, Charles Percy, asserted that it could risk limiting the influence the United States had on the Argentine government. Percy emphasized the heretofore-effectiveness of that influence, citing apocryphal evidence that their human rights performance had “improved,” that disappearances that year had fallen to zero, and that the number of prisoners being held had also been reduced. Ultimately, the bill,

Assistance and Sales for Argentina, was approved without the amendment, but with the caveat of a request for a “detailed report” asserting that “the Government of Argentina has made significant progress in complying with internationally recognized principles of human rights,” with particular attention to whether it has “made every effort to account for those citizens identified as ‘disappeared’” and the junta “has either released or brought to justice those prisoners held at the disposition of the National Executive Power

(PEN)” (Assistance and Sales for Argentina).

This documented debate and the language of the resulting bill instantiate the

United States government’s willingness to contribute to, and rationalize, human rights atrocity in order to safeguard economic and political influence; it is as if the U.S.

110 government was ready and willing to accept the junta’s campaign that “Argentinos somos derechos y humanos.” But the most striking quality of this discourse is the way in which that safeguarding adopts a neocolonial, proto-neoliberal educational model, one that co- opts ideas of public welfare to pursue privatized ends through the language of common standards. These Congressional pedagogues use the language of common standards to establish human rights benchmarks, yet these standards are deployed in service of bolstering the free market policies and politics they sought through the Plan Cóndor. In the language of the bill, Argentina must “meet” or “approach” the implied desired benchmarks of human rights performance, and must do so while performing an affect of voluntary willingness to comply. The Senate’s directive to Argentina evokes the figure of

Alicia at the beginning of La historia oficial, a cross teacher at the helm scolding the class bully, wagging her finger at the “naughty” Argentines with one hand while awarding them extra credit with the other. The absurdity of this image is equal to the outrageous, insistent myopia and ethical gymnastics of the recorded Senate debate.

Within it, however, we can identify a complex pedagogical coding of Argentina as the underperforming student of a human rights education; Argentina’s educability is contingent upon the extent to which they allow the United States to pursue economic dominance in a global free market.

This is the complex framework in which the willfulness articulated through these texts of remembrance becomes so urgent. Within their historical work of articulating and negotiating the individual and collective trauma of the dictatorship, La historia ofical and

The Little School invite their audiences to sustain their willfulness, to act out against instructional frameworks that designate subjectivity through an authoritarian metric of

111 educability. In this sense, willful learning as an ethical and aesthetic practice re-routes what Dominic LaCapra’s trauma theory imagines as the interacting processes of repeatedly “acting out” and critically “working through” (65). LaCapra’s theories presume (to borrow Sylvia Wynter’s term) a “genre” of trauma that is individually-rooted and event-based, something that can be “worked through,” rather than the result of structural and sociopolitical conditions.76

The willful learner who continually “acts out” against the violent pedagogical structures shifts the terms of knowledge-building and of power, and becomes a source of resilience within structurally-enacted traumas. The willfulness at the heart of the remembrance work of these texts shows us that such willful learning remains especially crucial in discourses that disguise their violence as human rights rhetoric. They show us how the terms with which we think of the human rights subject as an educable subject can either sustain or resist the instrumentalization of the rhetoric of human rights against public welfare.

76 For more on this critique, see Stef Craps’s Postcolonial Witnessing: Trauma Out of Bounds (2013).

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CHAPTER TWO

PALIMPSESTIC PEDAGOGY: ROBERTO BOLAÑO AND THE MEXICAN AMULET OF HUMAN RIGHTS

TRACES AND TRACINGS

Visitors to the Plaza de las tres culturas (Plaza of the Three Cultures) can take in the breadth of Mexican history in a single glance (Fig. 1). If they view plaza from behind the glass walls of the tall white building situated at the southern end of the plaza, their gaze will make its way over the Aztec ruins of the Mercado de Tlatelolco, the archeological grounds of Mexico’s last stand against Hernán Cortés and the Spanish conquest; then pause on Santiago Tlatelolco, the sixteenth-century colonial church and convent school; and come to rest on the large, blocky 1960s Milagro-era77 Chihuahua apartment building that is part of the vast Conjunto Urbano Nonoalco Tlatelolco apartment complex.

Figure 2-1: Plaza de las tres culturas. Photo taken by the author, April 8, 2017.

77 The “Milagro Mexicano,” or the “Mexican Miracle,” is a term commonly used by scholars and historians to refer to the economic growth of the 1960s. This “miracle” was the result of policy measures taken between 1940 and 1970 that were intended to transform Mexico into an industrialized economy and modernized nation.

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The plaza’s visible temporal layers invite visitors to read it as a palimpsest, a space that includes traces of its previous inscriptions in its present narrative. In Present

Pasts (2003), Andreas Huyssen offers the palimpsest as a metaphor for an urban environment that repurposes historical sites as memorials. He identifies this as a trend of

“musealization” that is responding to, he argues, a fear of forgetting in the face of

“modernity and triumphalist global and utopian discourses” (18).78 Though Huyssen overlooks the plaza in his case studies, the plaza exemplifies a space that shuffles any attempt at a neat, linear chronology of “history” and “modernity,” 79 enfolding such notions into one another in the space of a few minutes’ walk.

On the evening of October 2, 1968, another etching of modernity’s march was inscribed into the plaza’s grounds. The Tlatelolco massacre is recognized as one of the defining political and cultural moments in Mexico’s history. After the economic and industrial boom of the Milagro era, Mexico was chosen as the first Latin American country to host the Summer Olympic Games. President Gustavo Díaz Ordáz and his administration hailed the Games as a celebration of Mexican peace and prosperity; the country’s successful hosting would teach the world that Mexico, as a stand-in for Latin

America as a whole, was “modern” and ready to enter “the developing world” (Carey

11). As Mexico City ramped up its preparation for the games and crafted its international

78 Though Huyssen does address these discourses specifically in terms of capitalism, he does make reference to “mass-marketed memories” and their commodification (17, 19). 79 I use the term “modernity” not as a temporal designation, but in alignment with María Lugones (2010) and Walter Mignolo (2005; 2011)—both drawing from Aníbal Quijano (1991)—as a reference point for coloniality. As many scholars and Mexican intellectuals have discussed, the idea of the “modern Mexican nation” navigates an amalgamation of non-modern indigeneity, mestizaje, (post)coloniality, a perpetual revolution under the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (see footnote 79), a police state, and neoliberal global capitalism. See, among others, Carlos Fuentes (1971), Claudio Lomnitz (2005), Ryan Long (Fictions 2008), John A. Ochoa (2004), Octavio Paz (1981), Ignacio M. Sánchez-Prado (2014), and Gareth Williams (2011).

114 profile for the Olympics’ global audience, local high school and university students joined with workers to affect large-scale protests against the corruption and authoritarian- paternalistic rule of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI; Institutional

Revolutionary Party).80 But the Díaz Ordáz administration did not want Mexico’s image to be “tarnished by social unrest” (Long, Fictions 7). Ten days before the inauguration of the Games, students peacefully gathered at the Chihuahua building81 of the Tlatelolco plaza to organize their response to the latest round of government violence and arrests.

Video footage and witness accounts attest that shortly into the meeting, a flare was dropped by circling helicopters, at which point the soldiers who, armed with guns and bayonets, had blocked off the plaza’s exits began running over the Tlatelolco ruins toward the students. Paramilitary snipers had infiltrated the student body and led the soldiers to believe that the students had opened fire. Students and residents were caught in the middle of the escalating shootout. Students fled into and among the apartment complexes, where those who were not shot were rounded up, assaulted, and disappeared.

Official Mexican news outlets downplayed both the role of government and the body count, placing the blame on the students as terrorist agitators and asserting that there were twenty dead and forty wounded (Bixler 172). Meanwhile, international news outlets and

80 The PRI has been the most significant governing party since the wake of the Mexican Revolution (1910- 1920). They first formed as the Partido Nacional Revolucionario (National Revolutionary Party; 1929- 1938), then as the Partido de la Revolución Mexicana (Party of the Mexican Revolution; 1938-1946), and finally as the PRI (1946-present). They held power from 1929 to 2000; Mexico’s president at the time of this writing, Enrique Peña Nieto, is also affiliated with the PRI. At the party’s inception, its members purported to institutionalize the ideals of the revolution; over the course of its existence, the party adopted a range of ideologies and policies, including a significant shift to neoliberal global capitalism in the 1980s. For a history of the PRI, see, among others, Nora Hamilton (1982), Stephen Haber et al., (2008), Luis Javier Garrido (1991), and Francisco Reveles Vázquez (2003). 81 See Rubén Gallo (2009) for a history of the Chihuahua building as part of the Conjunto Urbano Nonoalco—a Milagro-era housing project of Tlatelolco. Gallo writes, “Tlatelolco began as a utopian project, but after 1968 it became the darkest symbol of Mexico’s dystopian failures” (114).

115 eyewitnesses placed the estimated number of the dead in the hundreds and speculated that there were upward of a thousand injured and/or imprisoned (Carey 1; Long, Fictions 7).

After the massacre, there was some debate within the Organizing Committee of the

Olympic Games as to whether the games should move forward in Mexico City.

Ultimately, however, Díaz Ordáz convened Mexico’s so-called “Games of Peace” on schedule, while families and friends looked for signs of their lost ones. In the years that followed, the Mexican government continued to frame the massacre as a “as a tragic but necessary guarantee of public order and collective progress and, perversely, an opportunity for Mexico to renew itself” (Long, Fictions 82).

Though a state-sponsored monument bearing the names of those whose deaths were officially recognized was placed at the site of the massacre, members of the public have rewritten the space in response to that narrative. Chalk outlines of nameless bodies, evoking a police procedural, cover the main square (Fig. 2). Paired with the phrase “ni

Figure 2-2: "Ni perdon, ni olvido." Photo taken by the author, April 8, 2017.

116 perdon ni olvido” (“never forgive, never forget”), the drawings insist on preserving the exigency of an investigation into these events. Like the literary allegorical ruins that, for

Idelber Avelar, resist a narrative of reconciliation and triumph, these drawings “carry the seeds of a messianic energy, which, like the Benjaminian angel of history, looks back at the pile of debris, ruins, and defeats of the past in an effort to redeem them, being at the same time pushed forward by the forces of ‘progress’ and ‘modernization’” (3). Yet these drawings and their refrain, “never forgive, never forget,” reject a narrative of redemption along with the closure and finality of messianic time.

These drawings again rewrite the palimpsest of the Plaza de las Tres Culturas; their presence foregrounds the willful discipline required to learn what happened at

Tlatelolco in 1968. As I discussed in the previous chapter, remembrance is fundamentally pedagogical, for it carries “implicit and/or explicit assumptions about what is to be remembered, how, by whom, for who, and with what potential effects” (Simon et al.,

Between Hope and Despair 2). In this chapter, I consider the pedagogies that structure the remembrance narratives of Tlatelolco. The cultural remembrance of Tlatelolco is dominated by a reductive and gendered narrative of the martyrdom and sacrifice of the students who were killed. This narrative is perpetuated by the PRI as a censorship tactic, by leftist activists and those sympathetic with the victims who seek to make sense of that loss, and even by scholars.82 My aim in this chapter is not to argue that the cultural work in response to these events seeks to combat forgetting or that it represents and contends

82 Samuel Steinberg and Gareth Williams effectively highlight notable instances of this tendency in the work of Diana Sorensen (2007), Roger Bartra (2007), Mark Kurlansky (2010), and Elaine Carey (2005). See Steinberg’s Photopoetics at Tlatelolco (2016), pages 8-9, and Williams’s The Mexican Exception (2011), pages 133-135.

117 with unhealed wounds; others have already made this argument effectively. Rather, my aim is to consider this legacy through a comparative and pedagogical framework. As a case study of human rights and the legacy of the Long Sixties, Tlatelolco highlights the co-formative relations among banking pedagogy, masculinity, and coloniality in remembrance; all similarly locate the educable subject in a position of lack, deficit, or absence (if they register the subject at all). The chapter builds toward a reading of

Roberto Bolaño’s novella Amuleto (1999; trans. Amulet, 2006). I argue that through

Amuleto, Bolaño reveals this predominant mode of Tlatelolco remembrance as a pedagogy of overdetermined, teleological loss. He then stages an intervention into it and proposes a pedagogical (and thus memorial) alternative that dislodges the educable subject within this pedagogy from the idealization of the liberal subject of human rights.

THE PEDAGOGY OF TLATELOLCO REMEMBRANCE

In the Plaza, the Memorial del 68 (‘68 Memorial) at the Centro Cultural

Universitario de Tlatelolco (University Cultural Center of Tlatelolco) exemplifies the predominance of this narrative of student sacrifice, and further, its attachment to the drive towards human rights.83 Mexico’s longer history of colonial violence and resistance encircles the gallery; it is impossible for visitors to enter the Memorial without seeing the

83 Modeled after the United Nations in New York City, the building had been the site of a number of notable events prior to its becoming the Cultural Center in 2007 (under the care of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México [National Autonomous University of Mexico]). In 1967, the building hosted the meeting of the Tratado de Tlatelolco (Treaty of Tlatelolco), an anti-nuclear arms pact that established Latin America as the only continental region free of nuclear armaments. On October 2, 1968, then-Interior Secretary Luis Echeverría, who would succeed Díaz Ordáz as president and continue his policies, filmed the massacre from the vantage point of the building’s rooftop (“Sobre el CCUT – CCU Tlatelolco”).

118 larger spatial context of the Plaza. The Memorial is designed so that visitors see this opening statement before entering the exhibition:

1968 constituye uno de los momentos más significativos de la historia reciente de

México. Las demandas de justicia, libertad y respeto a los derechos humanos

realizados por miles de jóvenes en el verano de este año, constituyeron el punto

de partida para impulsar la transformación de un país inmerso en un sistema

político autoritario y represivo, abriendo un camino crucial tanto para la

democracia como para el reconocimiento de una sociedad basada en la diversidad.

1968 constitutes one of the most significant moments in the recent history of

Mexico. The demands for justice, liberty, and respect for human rights made by

thousands of young people in the summer of this year constituted a starting point

to propel the transformation of a country immersed in an authoritarian and

repressive political system, opening a crucial pathway as much for democracy as

for the recognition of a society based in diversity.

This statement locates students at the origin of a linear progression from authoritarianism to democracy. In doing so, it subscribes to a narrative that instrumentalizes their loss and obscures, while paradoxically upholding, the “permanent application of state power in the construction of social order” (Williams 11). This framework of remembrance positions students as harbingers of human rights, but only as sacrificed objects. Their sacrifice is retroactively located at the origin of a society that purportedly upholds human rights, described in terms that one could just as easily pick out of the rhetoric of the Universal

Declaration of Human Rights (“a society based in diversity,” “justice, liberty, and respect

119 for human rights). Indeed, this statement emulates the shared logic of the Bildungsroman and the legal discourse of human rights discussed by Joseph Slaughter (2007), but it proceeds through the negative of its violation rather than its positive attribution: the students’ educability as liberal subjects makes them retroactively recognizable as victims of a human rights violation. In these sentences, Mexico is cast as a society that upholds human rights, but only through this act of victimization.

Tlatelolco is thus the wound that has never healed, and that can never be healed, because it has become entwined with the quest for a narrative of Mexico’s national identity as a modern nation. Carlos Fuentes captures this most evocatively in calling the events of 1968 a “derrota pírrica,” a “pyrrhic defeat,” or the logical reversal of the common phrase “pyrrhic victory,” indicating a victory won at a cost so great that it is indistinguishable from defeat. Fuentes explains that pyrrhic defeats are “derrotas aparentes cuyos frutos sí lo pudieron apreciarse a largo plazo: derrotas pírricas, victorias aplazadas” (“apparent defeats whose fruits can only become valuable in the long term: pyrrhic defeats, deferred victories”; Los 68 11). Fuentes’s phrasing underscores Roger

Bartra’s assertion that “[e]l año de 1968 nos ha dejado dos herencias: la derrota y la transición” (“The year 1968 has left us with two legacies: defeat and transition”; “Dos visiones del 68”). This blending of defeat and transition demonstrates what John Ochoa characterizes as “the uses of failure” in Mexican identity formation.84 Thus, it is not only the purported “heroes and villains” of this story that have become entrenched in cultural

84 See Ochoa (2004).

120 memory, but the status of those heroes as spectral figures of present absence, called into existence by the national teleology of a perpetually unhealed wound (Jolly 2).

We can better understand how the narrative of Tlatelolco as one of sacrificial, pyrrhic defeat operates as a cultural structure of learning by recalling Roger Simon’s comments on remembrance as a pedagogical form. He argues that “remembrance incorporates a set of evaluations that structure what memories should inform our social imagination, as well as a detailed, structured set of operations for presenting and engaging historical representations intended to provoke and solidify particular affect and meaning” (Simon, Touch of the Past 16).85 The chalk drawings “never forgive, never forget,” within the palimpsestic space of the Plaza insist upon making the tare of modernity, of liberal recognition, visible, but they also capture the conflicting learning metrics at work in the remembrance literature of Tlatelolco. As a pedagogical form, the remembrance of Tlatelolco affirms the liberal structure of educability that both enables and elides the violence against those marked “ineducable:” while the drawings refer to the Tlatelolco of 1968, and to the student victims, their directive could also refer to the

Aztec victims of Spanish colonizers, also memorialized by the Plaza’s palimpsest.

The learning metric of “never forgive, never forget” is further complicated by a context in which decades of PRI censorship have cornered efforts at remembrance into a mythologization of sacrifice as the root of a modern, democratic nation. If a viable narrative of remembrance maintains the national mythology of deferred victory, then the

85 While I draw from the work of Simon, Eppert, and Rosenberg (2000; 2005) in this chapter because they effectively and explicitly link processes of learning with processes of cultural remembrance, I do not fully agree with their approach. I find that their shared framework of remembrance and pedagogy too easily slips into an exoticization of the traumatized Other, which entrenches it as a colonial, banking pedagogy. I present my critique in more depth in the conclusion of this chapter.

121 educable subject of Tlatelolco (what I would designate as the educable subject in human rights) is a fusion of the figure of the student with the figure of the colonized Aztec victim, both sacrificed in the name of Mexico’s progression to modernity. Octavio Paz is often cited as the impetus for this fusion; for him, Tlatelolco instantiates a clash between a duality of “los dos Méxicos, el desarrollado y el subdesarrollado” (“the two Mexicos, one of them developed, the other underdeveloped”; 287). For Paz, the “underdeveloped” represents the legacy of the Aztecs and their ritualistic, aggressive natures.86 I will discuss his position in further depth later on in this chapter; for now, I want to emphasize the way this conception of the sacrificed student figure is synonymous with hetero- normative masculinity and coloniality. As María Lugones alerts us, coloniality, as the root of modernity, is always gendered: “[T]he coloniality of gender is constituted by and constitutive of the coloniality of power, knowledge, being, nature, and language. They are crucially inseparable” (757).87

Taken together, these features of Tlatelolco educability reflect what Roger Simon et al. have called a pedagogy of anamnesis, or the act of recollection and reminiscence.

This is distinct from a pedagogy of anagnorisis, or the act of discovery. They argue that while the aims of historical writing and memorialization are distinct, both presume a pedagogy of anamnesis:

86 See Postdata (1970), especially “Olimpiada y Tlatelolco” (“Olympics and Tlatelolco”) and “Crítica de la pirámide” (“Critique of the Pyramid”). Gareth Williams notes that “José Revueltas was the first to make this parallel between 1968, the pre-Hispanic world, and the modern sovereignty of the PRI,” though Páz’s has been the more influential (135). 87 Lugones’s observation suggests that banking pedagogy itself is a gendered, masculine construct. While this idea is certainly related to my argument, I am unable to pursue it fully in these pages.

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History is the writing and interpretation of narratives that seek a reasoned

understanding of past events. . . . Quite differently, memorialization is premised

on the moral injunction, “one must not forget.” Pedagogically understood, the

telling again of memorialization is a performative practice that attempts to bring

past lives and places into presence. To accomplish this task, memorialization must

transform modern conceptions of time as a spatial continuum through which we

move. . . . Neither practice, however, supports the possibility of an anagnorisis, a

learning from “the past” that is a critical recognition or discovery that unsettles

the very terms on which our understandings of ourselves and our world is based.

(“Witness as Study,” 105–106; my emphasis)

The injunction “one must not forget” echoes the declaration etched onto the Plaza: “ni perdon ni olvido.” While anamnesis, as the pedagogy of calling things to mind and reciting what is past, has a crucial role in healing and restitution, it risks structuring a cultural banking pedagogy that upholds the only viable metric of remembrance as one of mythologized sacrifice. Tlatelolco remembrance becomes a genre that implicitly establishes expectations for what and how audiences learn from a Tlatelolco narrative.

Considered in terms of Schillingsburg’s “horizontal axis” (what I discuss as the realm of the educable subjects of human rights), the narrative establishes a metric of audience educability in terms of its members’ ability to recognize Tlatelolco as sacrifice.

The case of Tlatelolco demonstrates why a pedagogy of anamnesis might take form within works of cultural remembrance; there is an urgent need to tell and recite in the face of a policy of censorship and a public response of “steely silence” and acceptance rather than dialogue (Carey 170). Censorship, and the anamnesis it cultivates,

123 structures a banking pedagogy because it “denies the ability of subjects to read and interpret narratives for themselves” (Jolly 7). The mythology of the sacrificed student upholds a remembrance metric of a stable, democratic society precisely because such a society is absent. Critical learning, anagnorisis, requires rupturing the stability created by this utopia. That rupture, however, poses a problem when it is in conflict with an ongoing need to establish stability and truth in remembrance; the aversion authors seem to have toward such a narrative is understandable.

However, I argue that Roberto Bolaño’s novella Amuleto does stage an intervention of critical learning into the anamnesis of Tlatelolco remembrance and into

Tlatelolco as an analogue for the atrocities in Latin America more broadly.88 I read the pedagogy of Amuleto in light of M. Jacqui Alexander’s proposal of pedagogy as an enabling metaphor for the ongoing processes of “making the world intelligible to ourselves” in spaces of domination and coloniality. For Alexander, these pedagogies fit uneasily into modernity’s order; they transgress, disrupt, displace, and invert inherited concepts and practices—“those psychic, analytic and organizational methodologies we deploy to know what we believe we know so as to make different conversations and solidarities possible” (7). The spaces of crossing in which these pedagogies develop are, for Alexander, palimpsestic; they scramble linear and hierarchical notions of tradition and modernity (189-91). I take Alexander’s lead and read the palimpsestic space of the Plaza de las Tres Culturas—its fully visible and constantly re-written layers of ruins,

88 Celina Manzoni (2003) first attributed anagnorisis specifically to Amuleto in her essay examining the practice of rewriting in Bolaño’s work more broadly, and in Amuleto in particular. I engage with her essay later in this chapter during my reading of Amuleto. Though she includes anagnorisis in her essay’s title, she does not elaborate further on the concept. The term originally comes from Aristotle’s Poetics, indicating a process of evolution from ignorance to knowledge that accompanies a dramatic reversal of a situation.

124 monuments, and graffitied memorials—as one of what I call “palimpsestic pedagogy”; I concurrently read Amuleto as the expression of a memorial pedagogy akin to the Plaza— as a palimpsest of pedagogical process that constantly remediates its own narrative acts. I argue that at the heart of the novella is an exploration of the ways in which remembrance is a process of learning, of what it means to be a subject within that pedagogy, and of the complex ways literary art is a pedagogical space. My reading elaborates on Gareth

Williams’s assertion that “we would do well to recognize that there are noteworthy alternatives to this essentially Christian narrative of 1968 as inescapable martyrdom, sacrifice, and social trauma,” and on Samuel Steinberg’s proposal that we “unbind” 1968 from its reductive “hegemonic key” in favor of “a more operative and open thinking worthy of 1968” (133; 4, 15).

The shift of educability that I read in Amuleto emphasizes that, despite its particular demands and influences on Mexico’s formation as a nation, Tlatelolco remembrance shares the liberal idealization of human rights seen in human rights discourse more broadly. These shared roots are evident even in the common parlance of

Tlatelolco as an inescapable “scar.” Author and 1968 student activist Elena Poniatowska uses this term as a way of expressing the centrality of the massacre within the intellectual formation of her generation, calling Tlatelolco “a brand, a scar that has never healed”

(Rohter). Scholars have taken up this phrasing as well; Gareth Williams, for example, observes that this “unhealed scar keeps the memory of 1968 alive” (133). Scholars’ use of the word “scar” as a metaphor for traumatic remembrance is revealing; contrary to this usage, a scar is an indication that a wound has, in fact, healed. My sense is that what is meant by Poniatowska and others is that the pain of the event remains raw and

125 unattended. This misnomer brings to mind Elizabeth Anker’s analysis of the fundamental ambivalence toward embodiment, and the outright condemnation of “impure” bodies in particular, in the liberal discourse of human rights.89 A “healed” scar would indicate that there is no trace of the scar, and thus no trace of the event having happened at all. I am confident that such an erasure is not Poniatowska’s hope, nor the hope of scholars and authors who continue to engage with Tlatelolco. Rather, their usage of “scar” (and its dissemination) reveals a linkage between the educable subject of human rights and the liberal subject of modernity in Tlatelolco remembrance. To find another framework for healing, then, one must desprenderse, as Aníbal Quijano puts it.90

In Amuleto, Bolaño de-links the educable subject of human rights from the liberal subject of modernity through what I am calling the palimpsestic pedagogy of the novella’s protagonist, Auxilio Lacouture. Auxilio asserts a different claim to educability from that of the liberal subject by failing to narrate the student movement and her place in it according to the metrics of the liberal idealization of human rights. Through this mode of learning, Auxilio remediates and rewrites the sacrificial and nostalgic politics of both leftist and authoritarian institutions (literary, political, and educational). The performance of failure that John Ochoa argues has “monumental standing” in Mexico is thus formally represented in Amuleto through Auxilio’s non-linear, constantly rewritten narration of learning (4). I read Auxilio’s failure-ridden narration as a palimpsestic act of revision within the ambiguous, contradictory, yet fully holistic space of Tlatelolco’s herida

89 See Anker (2012). 90 Quijano argues for epistemic “delinking,” or “desprendimiento,” as a means of “extricat[ing] oneself from the linkages between rationality/modernity and coloniality” (177). Walter Mignolo advances this notion as “epistemic disobedience” (2011).

126 abierta. The metaphor of the “open wound” invites us to turn to Gloria Anzaldúa’s theorization of the borderlands as a model of decolonial consciousness and learning. In contrast to what Steinberg observes as a tendency to easily resolve the contradictions of

Tlatelolco, Anzaldúa’s processes of identity formation through writing allow us to read the “wound” of Tlatelolco as a palimpsestic ground that enables “a tolerance for contradictions, a tolerance for ambiguity” (Borderlands 101). Through this lens, Auxilio does not simply represent a fractured, traumatized subject, but what María Lugones might call a feminist border intellectual (753).91 In the realm of the borderlands, Auxilio’s performance of failure as remediation becomes a pedagogy that foregrounds the messy process of learning itself, and Amuleto stages a resilient practice of learning in the face of the remembrance of a human rights atrocity that instrumentalizes loss.

In what follows, I discuss how the sacrificial myth of Tlatelolco is gendered as masculine and how these features relate to the legacy of a colonial banking pedagogy.

From there, I move into my pedagogical reading of Amuleto. I begin by addressing

Auxilio’s status as a learner in relation to the students of 1968, as well as in relation to

Bolaño’s imbrication of the political, literary, and educational institutions of 1968.

Drawing on Gloria Anzaldúa’s notions of consciencia and nepantla, I address Auxilio’s voice, the learning she demonstrates, and the way in which her pedagogy rewrites and remediates remembrance away from nostalgia in the service of the sacrificial politics of

91 I follow Lugones’s reading of Anzaldúa and her critique of Walter Mignolo’s reading of Anzaldúa. Lugones emphasizes that “the liminality of the border is a ground, a space, a borderlands . . . not just a split, not an infinite repetition of dichotomous hierarchies among de-souled specters of the human. Often in Mignolo’s work the colonial difference is invoked at levels other than the subjective/intersubjective. But when he is using it to characterize ‘border thinking,’ as he interprets Anzaldúa, he thinks of her as enacting it. In so doing he understands her locus as fractured” (753).

127 both the left and the state. Within my reading, the titular “amulet”—revealed only in the last sentence of the novella—is a protection precisely against that instrumentalization.

MYTH AND MASCULINITY

The wealth of literary, theatrical, and expository responses to the events at

Tlatelolco contrasts starkly with near-total absence of acknowledgement or investigation by the PRI party, as well as the absence of public dialogue.92 The formal trends of the initial series of historical narratives written in the aftermath of the events reflect an underlying drive to gather even the most basic of facts about the massacre. These literary histories include Luis González de Alba’s Los días y los años (1971; trans. The Days and the Years), written within and narratively framed by his time in Lecumberri prison;

Heberto Castillo’s Si te agarran te van a matar (1983; trans. If They Grab You, They’ll

Kill You); Carlos Monsiváis’s Días de guardar (1970; trans. Days of Observance); José

Revueltas’s México ’68: juventud y revolución (1979; trans. Mexico ’68: Youth and

Revolution); and Elena Poniatowska’s La noche de Tlatelolco: testimonios de historia oral (1971; Massacre in Mexico), a compilation of testimonies curated and introduced by

Poniatowska. The commonality among these texts is the way in which they place

92 See Dolly Young (1985) for an overview of essays, testimonies, and popular novels published in the immediate aftermath of the events, and see Jacqueline Bixler (2003) for theatrical work responding to Tlatelolco. See Jacinto Munguía’s “Expansive Bibliography of ’68” (“Bibliografía amplia sobre el 68”) at the end of his work, 1968: Todos los culpables (1968: All Guilty 2008) for scholarship, collective testimonies, documentaries, popular films, and recorded interviews. Young’s 1985 article claims to be the first major study of literary reactions to Tlatelolco ’68 (Young 71). That the first study comes from the U.S. academy and not from within Mexico emphasizes the political and institutional censorship of the event. Jaime Pensado describes the challenge of navigating attitudes toward this history in the introduction to his 2013 book. He recounts an exchange he had with a research director at the Instituto Politécnico Nacional (National Polytechnic Institute) who pressed him to give up the subject of his investigation on porrismo (student thuggery/provocation). Pensado writes, “The director’s attitude reflects the general wisdom within the historiography of modern Mexico, which insists on limiting the rich history of the student movement to the massacre in Tlatelolco on of [sic] October 2” (Pensado 3).

128 responsibility for the tragedy “squarely on the silent shoulders of the state” (Rojo 10). In this way, they represent what David William Foster calls “a productive ‘mythic’ factuality” particular to Latin American writing (45). Along with locating events on a supernatural scale of good vs. evil, the term “mythic factuality” suggests that Tlatelolco literature adopts the qualities of what Mikhail Bakhtin characterized as the “epic” (the recitation of things past – an anamnesis) in opposition to the contemporaneity and polyvocal quality he saw inherent in the novel.93 While Foster’s term makes reference to the way in which Mexican cultural production undermines Western, Cartesian categories of knowledge, it also captures the conflictual and colonial epistemologies operating in the discourse of myth.

Foster’s usage suggests that he is referring to the “mythic” in order to indicate a narrative that goes beyond the frame of the strictly rational, in the vein of magical realism. The history of the discourse of myth, however, has a number of relevant registers beyond this. “Mythic” can indicate the European Romantic notion of myth as a transcendental narrative; the structuralist notion of myth as a universal organizing principle of sacred importance; or the Marxist notion of myth as an ideological fiction.

Andrew Von Hendy attributes the origin of the modern usage of the term to the Romantic response to Enlightenment positivism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (78). The development of the notion of myth as such—not the indigenous narratives to which the folkloristic notion of myth refers—thus developed in dialogue with the Enlightenment era ideal of the liberal, educable subject. This initial notion of myth was primarily conceived through the work of German and English poets including Friedrich Schelling, William

93 See “Epic and Novel: Toward a Methodology of the Study of the Novel” in The Dialogic Imagination (1981).

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Wordsworth, and William Blake. At the same time, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm developed the folkloristic notion of myth and the ethnographic practices that contributed to the colonial origins of the field of anthropology.94 Von Hendy sees the Romantic construction of myth and the anthropological one in opposition, but I see them as complementing one another (77). In both cases, the discourse of myth developed as something that belonged to the realm of the ineducable according to the standards of the liberal, educable subject.

The connection between these registers of myth, and their relation to an idea of educability, can be seen right in the writing of the person considered to be the founder of anthropology, Edward Burnett Tylor (1832-1917). There is no confusion about the colonial nature of his major work, given its title: Primitive Culture (1871). For Tylor, one of the defining features of such a culture is what he calls its “mythic faculty”: “the processes of animating and personifying nature, the formation of legend by exaggeration and perversion of fact, . . . the adaptation of mythic incident as moral example, and the incessant crystallization of story into history” (415). As Von Hendy characterizes Tylor’s position, myth is a “history of the errors of the human mind” (85; my emphasis). The myth of student sacrifice at Tlatelolco represents more than just a throwaway term for a culturally-organizing lie in a Marxist sense; rather, “myth” is used to indicate a narrational process of social learning and the history of colonial disdain for (and exoticization of) such a faculty. Thus, Williams’s use of “mythic factuality” blends, in an unsettling yet appropriate way, into the discourse of the “mythic faculty” and its relation to colonial frameworks of educability.

94 The Brothers Grimm published their collections of German tales and sagas between 1812 and 1852.

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By the era of the Long Sixties, anthropology had entered a period of what Von

Hendy observes as the peak of “traffic in theories of myth,” and Octavio Paz was, so to speak, right there in rush hour (xvi). Two of Claude Lévi-Strauss’s major works advancing structuralism, La Pensée Sauvage (1962; trans. The Savage Mind) and Le Cru et le cuit (1964; trans. The Raw and the Cooked), had just been published after the success of Tristes Tropiques (1955; trans. A World on the Wane) and the definitive

Anthropologie structural (1958; trans. Structural Anthropology). Paz had brought Levi-

Strauss’s thinking to Latin America with Claude Lévi-Strauss o El nuevo festín de Esopo

(Claude Lévi-Strauss: An Introduction) in 1967. A structuralist understanding of mythology was, for both Octavio Paz and Carlos Fuentes, a “model for the foundation of meaning” as they entered into the tumult of 1968 (Rowe 77). Scholars attribute the founding of the Tlatelolco myth of student sacrifice to Postdata (1970), Paz’s post-

Tlatelolco addendum to El laberinto de la soledad (1950; trans. The Labyrinth of

Solitude).95 Paz writes about what happened at Tlatelolco as the cyclical recurrence of the nation’s Aztec past, a sacrificial reenactment within mythic time. Paz contrasts what he calls the “moderate petitions” of the students—as compared to the more radical demands of student groups in other countries—with the extreme response of the PRI (Postdata

249-50). This disjuncture is embodied in the interplay of the two terms “Olimpiada y

Tlatelolco” (Olympics and Tlatelolco), spatially centered within the pyramid as the symbolic site of Mexican sacrifice and massacre. Because Paz considers failure and defeat a generative feature of Mexican national identity, he ultimately imagines the PRI as the embodiment of both the violence of the Spanish conquistadores and the Aztec

95 Perniola (2009), Sorensen (2007), Williams (2011) and Steinberg (2016) all attribute the first mythic narrativization of Tlatelolco to Paz.

131 royalty, and thus fuses the students with both the victims of Aztec sacrifice and the defeated Aztec society.96 Paz ultimately places his structural-determinist, nationally- organizing narrative in the service of a profoundly settler-colonialist proposal of Mexican mestizaje.

Carlos Fuentes also adopted Lévi-Strauss’s structuralist view of mythology, an adoption that William Rowe argues is mediated through Paz (80). Fuentes’s Tiempo

Mexicano (1971) characterizes the events as the heroic origin point of a new era in

Mexican history—the youth’s rupture with the politics of their fathers and grandfathers

(represented by the PRI) that will ultimately bring about a more progressive future. Juan

Antonio Sánchez Fernández observes that both Paz and Fuentes understand Tlatelolco through sacrifice—for Paz, a ritual sacrifice, and for Fuentes, a political one (136). In both cases, the insistence on a narrative of sacrifice not only “inserts the violent crushing of a prodemocratic movement into the narrative of progress (toward democracy) and thus redeems the violence at its center,” as Steinberg argues; the narrative of sacrifice also underscores the coloniality of the notion that Tlatelolco shephered Mexico into modernity

(8).

The “mythic factuality,” or what Mario Perniola effectively describes as “el regimen achimítico” (the “mythic regimen”) of Tlatelolco, underscores how this narrative of remembrance relates to the history of colonialism and the idealized liberal, educable subject (31). “Mythic factuality” takes on the form of a banking pedagogy, because the circumstances of remembering and understanding Tlatelolco establish learning as a deficit to be filled—just as Freire characterizes the “banking” model of education. While

96 See Ochoa’s reading of failure in the work of Octavio Paz (8-11). He observes that for Paz, “[f]rankly accepting failure, for Mexicans, is paradoxically liberating” (10).

132 this position indeed resonates with the discourse of the idealized liberal subject of human rights (and thus with a banking pedagogy), it also reflects what scholars have called the

“spectrality” of Tlatelolco itself: the unsettled ghosts of the sacrificed student-heroes, and further, the spectrality of the event caused by censorship. Recently, scholars have foregrounded this ongoing deficit of knowledge about the event as the driving feature of the mythos of Tlatelolco: Williams argues that Paz recognizes this as an “eternal and inescapable return of loss,” while Steinberg asks, “What if the thing we associate with the signifier 1968 can only be or remain in its very lack of place?” (137; 20). The trope of sacrifice, then, becomes a signifier for this lack: the absence of the victimized (and fused) figures of the Aztecs and students; the lack of an account of these victims; and the lack of a “modern” Mexico, a “democratic” and “diverse society” promised by the teleology of the Memorial del ’68 in the Centro Cultural Universitario de Tlatelolco. As a cultural pedagogy, the myth of Tlatelolco does not address this deficit; rather, it attempts to solve the problem of this perpetual lack by re-defining it as something that is culturally, or ritually, generative—as sacrifice. In recursively returning to deficit as the defining feature of remembrance, however, its narratives become cemented in the form of a banking pedagogy.

Some of the more contemporary literary responses to the Tlatelolco massacre suggest a frustration with this “mythic regime,” alongside representing the trauma of the event itself and the anxiety of an ongoing absence of information (and dialogue) about what happened. Jacinto Munguía’s 1968: Todos los culpables (2008; trans. All the Guilty

Ones) takes the form of a quasi-legal account of the guilty players of Tlatelolco—the students themselves, the intellectuals, Díaz Ordáz, and Echeverría and his government—

133 and in doing so, reflects on each player’s part in the event and its remembrance. Each guilty listing (seventeen of them) begins with a different epigraph taken from Joseph

Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Though Munguía offers no comment on his incorporation of these epigraphs, the epigraphs evoke what Abdul JanMohamed calls the “Manichean allegory” at the heart of Western culture and its coloniality, which forecloses any

“syncretic cultural possibility” that would depart from the status quo of white power (69).

JanMohamed reads Heart of Darkness as a depiction of “the process whereby the colonialist is transformed by the structure he sets in place” (70). This understanding of

Heart of Darkness reveals Munguía’s epigraphs as a powerful condemnation of the complicity of all parties in the structure of violence that led to the explosive outbreak at

Tlatelolco.

The final “guilty one” is memory itself. In the chapter, he imagines memory converted into mountains of paper stored away in cardboard boxes, papers that were held in Lecumberri prison with the movement leaders imprisoned there. He imagines the route these papers took through the offices and hands of government functionaries to end up sequestered away in cardboard boxes as the prison’s latest palimpsestic iteration: the

National Archives (Munguía 236-39). This final account of “guilt” condemns the failure of mythologizing as a means of addressing the continuing, present absence of a true account of Tlatelolco. Munguía’s text emphasizes that the “mythic factuality” of

Tlatelolco enacts what Achille Mbembe observes of societies under the conditions of what he calls “necropower,” in which “the lines between resistance and suicide, sacrifice and redemption, martyrdom and freedom are blurred” (Mbembe 40).97

97 Mbembe’s “necropower” indicates, beyond Foucault’s conceptualization of biopower, the structural conditions of civil and societal death that make claims over the body. Mbembe uses the examples of

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Paco Ignacio Taibo II’s short book, 68, is celebrated for taking a step in the direction of “desmitificación del movimiento” (“de-mythifying the movement”; Perniola

34). Taibo, a detective novelist, historian, and essayist, begins his narrative of ’68 with a linkage between pedagogical inquiry and its effect on the form of literary art. In the first vignette, he grapples with what to do with his notebooks, which are filled with his thoughts from that era. He presents the writing in these notebooks as the medium through which he finds his voice and transforms his personal memory into collective memory.

However, that transformation is embattled: it takes the form of a novel “que no quiere ser escrita” (“that doesn’t want to be written”; 11). The vignette, accordingly, is titled, “Se explica que con cosas como estas nunca puode escribir una novella” (“Wherein It Is

Explained That with Stuff Like This I Could Never Write a Novel”; 9). Nevertheless, readers hold this “unrealized” novel in their hands. This suggests that instead of aspiring to the educable coherence of the form of the novel, 68 adopts the form of the notebooks—unpolished, investigatory, archivally-driven (indeed, palimpsestic) works-in- progress. For this work of remembrance, then, the imperative of the learning processes represented in those notebooks overwhelms the possibility of a linear, banking-based learning process enacted in the form of the novel. In other words, Taibo attempts to make space for the reader to learn along with him, rather than from him.

His pedagogy takes shape as questioning in the second vignette. As if in answer to the unwritten question of why what he writes cannot be a novel, the vignette is titled, “De cómo desde el principio esta historia se va llenando de preguntas” (“How from the

slavery, apartheid, and the occupation of Palestine to demonstrate different forms of necropower over the body and its relation to precarious conditions of life. We can see the link between the structural necropower at play at Tlatelolco and the Mexican “War on Drugs,” which has brought about the disappearance of at least 26,000 people since 2000 (Janzen 3).

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Beginning This Story Brims with Questions”). The chapter reads like a prose poem, a disordered litany of questions, ranging from the banal to the didactic, theoretical, and personal. I reproduce some here:

¿Cuál era el menú diario en el comedor de Ciencias Políticas?

¿Qué cuestionaba el movimiento de 68?

¿Cuándo reforma y no revolución?

¿Por qué cayó Romeo a causa de una minifalda?

What was the menu in the Political Sciences cafeteria?

What was the ’68 Movement protesting?

When is revolution not revolution but reform?

Why was Romeo busted on account of a miniskirt? (12-13)

But this broad range of questions converges into the single most urgent one: “¿Dónde arrojaron a nuestros muertos? ¿Dónde tiraron a nuestros muertos? ¿Dónde mierdas arrojaron a nuestros muertos?” (“Where did they throw our dead? Where did they toss our dead? Where, for fuck’s sake, did they throw our dead?” 12-13). Taibo proposes that the student movement’s mode of learning, which cultivated dialogue—including among the dead, lives in at the root of the literary form that grapples with human rights atrocity.

At the same time, that form recursively adopts the shape and tone of an anxiety about the ongoing absence of answers to those questions, and thus an absence of dialogue. Taibo’s narration of his writing process ends with the following reflection:

Pero también hay días en que me veo a mí mismo y no me reconozco. Son

tiempos malos, en que la noche se prolonga del día lluvioso, el sueño no llega y

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peleo inútilmente con el teclado de la computadora. Y entonces descubro que

parecemos condenados a ser fantasmas del 68.Y bueno, ¿cuál es la bronca?

Mucho mejor condes Dráculas de la resistencia, que monstruos priístas de

Frankenstein o de la modernidad, me digo. Y entonces, saco chispas sin gracia de

las teclas, bengalitas, recuerdos que a veces duelen y las más levantan la sonrisa;

y añoro aquel sentido del humor, extraño esa perdida intensidad para tener miedo

de las sombras, aquella sensación de inmortalidad, ese otro yo de aquel

interminable año. (116)

But then there are days when I see myself, and I don’t recognize myself. Bad

times, when the night prolongs a rainy day, when sleep won’t come, and I wrestle

vainly with the computer keyboard. I realize then that we seem doomed to be

ghosts of ’68. Well, what’s so bad about that? I ask myself: better to be Draculas

of resistance than PRI-ist monsters of Frankenstein, or of modernity. And then the

keys produce graceless sparks, weak flares, memories that are sometimes painful

but most of the time raise a slight smile; and I long for that old spirit of laughter; I

mourn, growing fearful of the dark, for an intensity now lost, for that feeling of

immortality, for that other me of that never-ending year. (trans. Nicholson-Smith

122)

Until this point, Taibo’s approach has ruptured the mythologization of Tlatelolco by foregrounding the processes of learning—messy notebooks, questions—instead of their finished forms. In the end, though, he still feels that the primary means of understanding

Tlatelolco available to him is through the frame of Romantic (specifically, Gothic) tropes that, as I have discussed, intersect with the discourse of myth. Though he has extracted

137 heroic sacrifice from this narrative, he and his fellow students still must take up the role of the living dead. He compares the student protestors to the living dead figure of

Dracula, which emphasizes their capacity for continuing social impact; in contrast, he casts the PRI as Mary Shelley’s imagining of a re-animated corpse made monstrous, a soul ruined in the name Victor Frankenstein’s myopic pursuit of progress as the vanquishment of death. The over-determination of loss, in these Romantic terms, remains a familiar and comforting space for Taibo. His text compellingly struggles with the limitations of this framework of anamnesis, of coloniality-modernity, and formally stages this struggle on palimpsestic, pedagogical terms.

Taibo’s book reminds us that the ur-educable subject of liberal, colonial modernity is masculine. The sacrifice at the heart of the myth of Tlatelolco, and at the center of its banking pedagogy, is also coded as masculine, reflecting the gendered nature of the culture of the student movement and of nation-building more broadly (Sommer,

Foundational Fictions 14-15). The idea of the “motherhood of the nation” indicated the subjugation and violation of women, particularly women of color. We can see how masculine pedagogy operates on a societal level through Aníbal Quijano’s comments on the extension of Cartesian dualism to entire Latin American societies, resulting in a colonial framework of liberal educability: “White men are their minds and everyone else is represented in corporeal terms” (Coloniality of Power 555-56; my emphasis). The dualism of body and mind extends to the liberal roots of the banking pedagogy, in which women are fundamentally ineducable subjects. Under the “mythic factuality” of

Tlatelolco remembrance, to remember the figure of the student is to remember a masculine figure of educability.

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Elaine Carey’s study connects the gender dynamics of the student movement to the gendered nature of the execution of sovereign-colonial power that produced the massacre and its legacy. For the students, Che Guevara was a mythologized representation of the ideal masculine figure, one who modeled masculinity as the archetype of intellectualism and sacrifice (Carey 13; Sorensen 28-35). Women in the movement were often relegated to fulfilling traditional gender roles as maids, secretaries, and caretakers (Carey 88). Carey further observes that “the Mexican government deemed politicized young men as deviant, suspicious, seditious, and dangerous because they embraced foreign influences as represented in youth culture [,] while at the same time they resisted co-option into the ruling party. Women, on the other hand, were not seen in such a politicized way because they were not seen to have the same potential for power as their male counterparts” (6). Similar to the student movement in Argentina, even while women fulfilled traditional gender roles within the movement, as activists the women were coded as masculine and deviant, and thus doubly ineducable.

The notions of masculinity driving the actions and remembrance of Tlatelolco also developed out of Mexico’s particular colonial and postcolonial history, including its proximity to its neoimperial neighbor (Domínguez-Ruvulcaba 2). Domínguez-Ruvulcaba observes that Mexican “Boom” authors, particularly Paz, emphasized the guilt of machismo in order to overcome it (just as Sarmiento wanted to overcome the “savage” impulses of the Argentine gauchos), yet they did so by extrapolating “the reaction between the aggressive masculine role and the victimized feminine one” (82).98 In

98 Domínguez-Ruvulcaba further observes that “these masculine and feminine roles also develop in the homosocial space of the men-only gathering. The macho is then a macho in relation to another man, whom

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Mexico, these metrics were upheld by certain dichotomous female archetypes of colonial motherhood: namely, La Malinche—alternately the raped indigenous mother of Mexico and the colonial collaborator, and Guadalupe, the virgin mother—or, in Emily Hind’s terms, the virgin and the slut (94).99 While she observes that these archetypes were interchangeable and malleable, “[n]either La Malinche nor La Virgen de Guadalupe supplies a ready model for Mexican intellectual women [,] because the archetypes connote highly problematic relationships with knowledge” (28, 94). Both figures represent corollaries to the archetype of masculine intellectualism and sacrifice—Che, and both are reinscribed by the sacrificial pedagogy of Tlatelolco.

This point, at last, brings us to Roberto Bolaño and his (anti-)heroine of the

Mexican student movement. Through Auxilio, Bolaño depicts a feminist alternative to the intellectualism and sacrifice overdetermined by the intersecting masculinities of colonialism and machismo. Ryan Long has observed that Amuleto represents Bolaño’s critique of Tlatelolco’s teleological remembrance, writing that “Amuleto is notable in this regard for being a critical analogue of that archive” (“Traumatic Time” 131). In my reading, however, I take this observation further and argue that Bolaño constructs this critique pedagogically. Auxilio’s narration disrupts a pedagogical structure that reifies a liberally-rooted metric of learning as deficit and recitation (as anamnesis) within

Tlatelolco remembrance.

he must symbolically chingar [to rape] or rajar [to crack or to chicken out] to keep his macho attributes” (107). 99 In El laberinto de la soledad, Paz famously analyzes the melancholy condition of Mexican identity in terms of La Chingada—the fucked one, in reference to La Malinche.

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Discussions of Bolaño’s work in the context of human rights discourses have tended to overlook Amuleto, focusing instead on his Chilean novels or the murdered women of Bolaño’s fictionalized Ciudad Juarez in his most lauded and final novel, 2666

(2004).100 Within these conversations, scholars note that Bolaño’s aesthetics show, rather than tell, the challenges of representing atrocity in contemporary society; he formally demonstrates the ways in which “misogyny, racism, and anti-Semitism are woven into the history of the ideological conflicts of the twentieth century” (Lynd 43).101 Contrary to the U.S. tendency to read Bolaño as a mythical mixture of “Che Guevara and Jack

Kerouac,” Amuleto demonstrates Bolaño’s commitment to troubling the essentialism of such mythologized masculinity and to exploring, ethically, structural differences of gender, or what Emily Hind felicitously calls “writing the boob” (Volpi 174-75; Hind

23). In arguing that Amuleto is a critique and re-imagining of the remembrance pedagogy of Tlatelolco, I do not mean to suggest that Bolaño is ambivalent about whose account of what happened at Tlatelolco is factually accurate; indeed, he refers to all of his writing as

“a love letter or a farewell letter for my own generation,” the student generation of the

Long Sixties (Lynd 33). Rather, my argument demonstrates that Amuleto reflects and rewrites the trappings of the instrumentalized remembrance of human rights atrocity.

100 Bolaño’s Chilean novels, anchored geographically and/or metaphorically in the Augusto Pinochet dictatorship (from 1973 to 1990), are considered to be La literatura Nazi en América (1996; trans. Nazi Literature in the Americas), Estrella distante (1996; trans. Distant Star), and Nocturno de Chile (2000; trans. By Night in Chile). The only direct allusion to the title of Bolaño’s final novel, 2666, appears in Amuleto, when Auxilio describes the Mexico City neighborhood of Guerrero as “un cementerio del año 2666” (“a cemetery in the year 2666”; 63). 101 Alice Driver, for example, observes that Bolaño’s fascination with femicide (which she calls “feminicide,” drawing from the Spanish term feminicidio) translates into an aesthetics in his novel 2666. This aesthetics demonstrates the way such murders become lost and buried in layers of stories within stories (“Feminicide”).

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AUXILIO LACOUTURE: THE NEW MESTIZA

This is my home

this thin edge of

barbwire.

-Gloria Anzaldúa

Amuleto nominally takes place on the bathroom floor of the Universidad Nacional

Autónoma de Mexico (UNAM) during the army’s siege of the campus in the fall of

1968.102 The novel’s narrator, Auxilio, is an Uruguayan woman living in Mexico City.

During the day she does odd jobs for professors and staff at the UNAM and occasionally sits in on classes; at night she wanders among the underground and aspiring poets and writers of the city. Auxilio is in the bathroom of the UNAM reading poetry when the army takes control of its campus. She, along with the army, remains there for thirteen days. She narrates the events of Mexico 1968 from the bathroom floor. But this is not the clear, ordered narration of causality that one might find in a legal testimony, or even in the brief testimonials of Poniatowska’s La noche de Tlatelolco. She second-guesses; she contradicts herself; she proclaims her own mistakes; she mixes the events of her life with phantasmal encounters with literary and historical figures of her century; she disregards the temporalities of past, present, and future.

Like Scheherazade’s bedroom, the UNAM bathroom becomes a space containing temporal and narrative multitudes; it is also the domain of a female composing her way out of a violent environment. Scholars thus tend to read Amuleto as the formal and

102 The army’s thirteen-day occupation of the UNAM and later Instituto Politécnico Nacional (National Polytechnic Institute) campuses between September 18 and October 1 precipitated the October 2 student gathering at the Plaza de las tres culturas.

142 semantic staging of a totalizing trauma. Ryan Long, for example, draws from Cathy

Caruth’s conception of trauma theory and argues that “[t]he traumatic moment that intrudes upon every moment of Lacouture’s life is, in its pervasiveness, unbound. But, it is also a binding machine, a narrating machine that, when compared to a projector, produces images of numerous possible futures” (“Traumatic Time” 141). While Long acknowledges the generative potential of her narration, he removes Auxilio from the seat of that generation by referring to her trauma as the “machine” producing alternatives.

Reading Auxilio’s narration through Gloria Anzaldúa’s conceptualization of the “wound” of the borderlands allows for a more thorough engagement with how Auxilio, as an intellectual, navigates trauma as a generative moment of transformation and learning.

This approach prevents us from relegating Auxilio to a peripheral and fractured figure of the broadly-washed “neoliberal global city” and thus a fundamentally “unreliable” narrator.103 Contrary to such a reading, particularly in regard to its conceptualization of trauma, I argue that Auxilio’s palimpsestic process of narrating (and of learning) “casts a relation with loss without being subsumed by it” (Simon et al., Between Hope and

Despair 5).

Reading this Tlatelolco narrative through an Anzaldúan lens draws from the

Aztec history of Mexico without characterizing it as “underdeveloped” or aggressive, as

Octavio Paz’s mythologizing does. Anzaldúa’s terminology helps highlight Auxilio’s qualities as a mestiza intellectual and her model of feminist and decolonial learning.

Educators Sarah Klotz and Carl Whithaus argue that Anzaldúa’s rhetoric structures a pedagogical framework of this kind, observing that “[i]n Anzaldúa’s terms, ‘la mestiza’

103 See especially Rory O’Bryen (2011), Stacey Balkan (2012), and Salvador Oropesa (2015).

143 constantly has to shift out of habitual formulations; from convergent thinking, analytical reasoning that tends to use rationality to move toward a single goal (a Western mode), to divergent thinking, characterized by movement away from set patterns and goals and toward a more whole perspective, one that includes rather than excludes” (80). In other words, Auxilio is the ur-educable subject of a decolonial feminist framework of recognition and remembrance.

For Anzaldúa, a “choque” (a violently disruptive event) such as the Tlatelolco massacre becomes a crucially generative moment for a mestiza identity. In her characteristic mixture of Spanish, English, and Nahuatl, she writes that “[e]ste choque shifts us to nepantla, a psychological, liminal space between the way things had been and an unknown future. Nepantla is the space in-between, the locus and sign of transition. In nepantla we realize that realities clash, authority figures of the various groups demand contradictory commitments, and we and others have failed living up to idealized goals”

(Light in the Dark 17). In this sense, nepantla is a way of reading what Ryan Long sees in

Amuleto as the importance of the dialectical relation between shelter and intemperie, a threatening sense of exposure, to Bolaño’s critique of the Tlatelolco legacy (“Traumatic

Time” 129). While Long’s focus on intemperie is instructive, Anzaldúa’s usage of nepantla, alongside other Aztec concepts and figures, more effectively highlights how the

“choque” of Tlatelolco, and of Auxilio’s trauma, does not strip Auxilio of her capacity for teaching and learning—in other words, for narration. On the contrary, inhabiting the space of trauma is a vital stage in a process of resilience and transformation within the structural violence that enables such “choques.”

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My purpose is not to debate whether it was Bolaño’s authorial intent to anchor his literary and political critique in the decolonial pedagogy of a woman of color; doing so would require more extensive biographical and archival research into Bolaño’s life and writing than I am able to undertake in completing this dissertation. I do argue, however, that Amuleto, as a work of art, invites and stands up to a reading rooted in women-of- color pedagogies and thus advances a heretofore absent reading of Tlatelolco. Because

Bolaño inserts versions of himself as a character in his fiction (in Amuleto, he is Arturo

Belano), scholars tend to read Bolaño’s life into his work and vice versa with more authority than is necessarily warranted. Doing so contributes, I think, to his commercial mythologization as a masculine, “sacrificed” rebel literary legend, a mythos that buries the ethical commitments of Bolaño’s literary work.104 That being said, there are some relevant elements of Bolaño’s biography that he wrote into Amuleto, elements that support my contention that Amuleto invites this pedagogical reading. When he moved to

Mexico City at sixteen years old, Bolaño dropped out of school (or was expelled) and took to the streets of the city, and to literature itself, as his education (Gutiérrez-Mouat 1-

2). During this time, he witnessed the student protests of 1968 and the violent responses of the PRI. As Juliet Lynd observes, “Bolaño was not directly involved with student protests, but . . . they would have been impossible to ignore” (39). He and his family lived near Tlatelolco Plaza, and his mother was friends with an Uruguayan women,

Alcira Soust Scaffo, a poet and educator who hid out in the UNAM bathroom during the military’s occupation of the campus (40). Scaffo would become Auxilio Lacouture.105 In

104 For an excellent commentary on this trend, see Horacio Castellanos Moya’s essay, “Bolaño Inc.” and Sarah Pollack (2009). 105 For more on Alcira Soust Scaffo and her relationship to figures in the student movement, see Sergio Abraham Méndez Moissen (2015) and Mónica Mateos-Vega (2017).

145 transforming Scaffo into Auxilio, Bolaño both historicizes his fiction and incorporates the popular “folk hero” imaginings of youth culture during that era as a mode of storytelling.

Like Bolaño and Soust, Auxilio is a supra-institutional figure—a simultaneous insider-outsider to institutions of education and of literature. Auxilio traverses and is excluded from clearly defined institutionalized spaces: the educational space of the

UNAM,106 the sectarian and masculine spaces of both the literary scene and the student movement, and the national-economic spaces of a steady job and documented status. She both draws attention to and stands in contention with categories that represent

“dichotomous, hierarchical logic as central to modern, colonial, capitalist thinking about race, gender, and sexuality” (Lugones 742). Thus, Auxilio inhabits what Anzaldúa calls the “intimate terrorism” of the borderlands (Borderlands 42). The violence and transformative capacity of this space remains even after Auxilio leaves it. She processes how to include her experience in the life she leads after it by situating her narrative through others’ often erroneous stories about her. She tells us:

Y yo seguí viviendo (pero faltaba algo, faltaba lo que había visto), y muchas

veces escuché mi historia, contada por otros, en donde aquella mujer que estuvo

trece días sin comer, encerrada en un baño, es una estudiante de Medicina o una

secretaria de la Torre de Rectoría, y no una uruguaya sin papeles y sin trabajo y

sin una casa donde reposar la cabeza. Y a veces ni siquiera es una mujer sino un

hombre, un estudiante maoísta o un profesor con problemas gastrointestinales. Y

106 Elaine Carey’s study of gender and the student movements underscores the historical elements of this exclusivity. She relates that the UNAM was known for being the “academic temple of the elite,” in contrast to the more working-class Poli, or Instituto Politécnico Nacional (National Polytechnic Institute) (45). She further observes that while UNAM enrollment for women had increased in the 1960s, men still dominated the ranks of the programs that were not traditionally gendered as feminine interests (such as teaching, social work, dentistry, and nursing) (64). On the national level, the PRI painted foreigners who were affiliated with the student movement as “traitors and communists” (45).

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cuando yo escuchaba esas historias, esas versiones de mi historia, generalmente

(sobre todo si no estaba bebida) no decía nada. (121-122)

I went on living (although something—what I had seen—was missing), and often

I would hear my story told by others, who said that the woman who had gone

without food for thirteen days, shut up in the bathroom, was a medical student, or

a secretary from the administration building, not an illegal alien from Uruguay,

with no job and no place of her own to lay her head. Sometimes it wasn’t even a

woman but a man, a Maoist student or a professor with gastrointestinal problems.

And when I heard those stories, those versions of my story, usually (if I wasn’t

drunk) I held my peace. (Andrews 167-177)107

Auxilio maps both the misconceptions and the brutalities of how her identity has taken shape within the space and time of Tlatelolco. With this reflection, Bolaño connects

Auxilio to the students of the movement, but in a way that distinguishes her from the

“sacrificed” student figures. She stands in the social and cultural role of witness, but does not subscribe to the institutionalized structures of witnessing that have reproduced an overdetermined narrative of that era.

Rather than thinking of her as someone with “peripheral” status within all of the social spaces to which she alludes, we can think of Auxilio as an inhabitant of the borderlands. In doing so, we see the generative possibilities of her status as a learner in the spaces of 1968. Anzaldúa characterizes the “intimate terror,” the legacy of colonial violence in the borderlands, in a way that presages Kelly Oliver’s notion of witnessing as

107 I note the discrepancy between Bolaño’s phrasing of Auxilio as “una uruguaya sin papeles” (“an undocumented Uruguayan woman”) and Andrews’ translation of the phrasing as “illegal alien from Uruguay.” Andrews’s translation presents Auxilio more pejoratively than Bolaño’s language suggests.

147 response-ability and address-ability. Oliver argues that “[o]nly a response that opens rather than closes the possibility of response is a responsible response” (108). Similarly,

Anzaldúa observes that “[t]he ability to respond is what is meant by responsibility, yet our cultures take away our ability to act—shackle us in the name of protection. Blacked, immobilized, we can’t move forward, can’t move backwards” (Borderlands 42-43).

Auxilio’s status as a learner who aspires to both response-ability and address-ability is emphasized by her name; in English, auxilio means “aid” or “remedy.” She seeks such aid while she occupies the bathroom of the UNAM and, by remaining on the campus during the military’s occupation, offers it. Yet throughout the novella, Auxilio also provides aid—to professors, to Arturo Belano’s concerned mother, to a boy being sex- trafficked.108 Thus, Auxilio embodies both the potential to receive aid and to offer it, to be both address-able and response-able. Yet Auxilio chooses not to respond to the mischaracterizations of her legend that replace her with the more traditional figures of rebellion and intellectualism (the Maoist student and the dyspeptic professor). Anzaldúa’s assertion, however, that such periods of inactivity are “as necessary as breathing,” that they are part of how a mestiza “makes the connections, formulates the insights,” emphasizes that Auxilio’s liminality and silence are part of her process as a mestiza intellectual (71).

Auxilio’s self-identified connection to indigeneity plays an important role in her intellectualism. She draws this connection when she first introduces herself, saying:

108 Arturo, or Arturito, Belano (Bolaño’s fictionalized alter-ego) and his student-poet friends also call to Auxilio in a manner that emphasizes her answer as a response to a call for aid, crying “Auxilio, Auxilio, Socorro, Amparo, Caridad, Remedios Lacouture” (“Auxilio, Assistance, Help, Shelter, Charity, Remedy Lacouture”; Amuleto 61). Bolaño frames the novella with an epigraph by Petronius that also emphasizes this double-connotation of her name: “Queríamos, pobres de nosotros, pedir auxilio; pero no había nadie para venir en nuestra ayuda” (“In our misery we wanted to scream for help, but there was no one there to come to our aid”).

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Me llamo Auxilio Lacouture y soy uruguaya, de Montevideo, aunque cuando los

caldos se me suben a la cabeza, los caldos de la extrañeza, digo que soy

charrúa,109 que viene a ser lo mismo aunque no es lo mismo, y que confunde a los

mexicanos y por ende a los latinoamericanos. (Amuleto 9-10)

My name is Auxilio Lacouture and I am Uruguayan—I come from Montevideo—

although when I get nostalgic, when homesickness wells up and overwhelms me,

I say I’m a Charrúa, which is more or less the same thing, though not exactly, and

it confuses Mexicans and other Latin Americans too. (Andrews 1).

While her self-identification as Charrúa can easily be read as an offhanded Uruguayan colloquialism and a moment (as she says) of nostalgic essentialism, I contend that it serves as an anchor for rupturing the colonial, masculine pedagogy of sacrifice that characterizes the legacy of Tlatelolco.110 A helpful starting point for situating this identity within Mexico’s racial “confusion” is with José Vasconcelos.

Vasconcelos radically reformed Mexican education in the wake of the revolution; he increased school enrollment and literacy programs, opened the teaching profession to women, and championed the arts (Ochoa 114; Hooker 240). His educational policies and theories developed in tandem with his racial theories. He endeavored to reinvent the

Mexican nation and “the Latin race” through mestizaje—“an idealized aesthetic education and exemplarity” that Chicano/a activists in the Long Sixties, and later

109 The Charrúa tribe occupied what became known as northern Argentina, Uruguay, and southern Brazil. Jerome Branch refers to the tribe as one of many “extinct” indigenous groups who once inhabited that area but were decimated after the genocides of colonization and nineteenth-century nationalism (15). 110 I have not found any scholarship that directly comments on Auxilio’s relation to an indigenous identity, save for that of Stacey Balkan, who argues that Auxilio is “the image of the iconic masses—no national identity, no past, no face—an amorphous persona who is the iconic Latin American Indian made wretched by the colonial era” (5). Balkan does not extrapolate on how that status is established or what it suggests about Auxilio’s relation to the epistemologies of modernity/coloniality that render her as that “image.”

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Anzaldúa herself, would adopt (Ochoa 117). Vasconcelos’s promotion of mestizaje through cultural initiatives worked in tandem with the pedagogy and policies of the

Ministry of Public Education (Coffey 5). In La raza cósmica, he trumpets periods of racial mixture as those during which civilizations enjoyed the most rapid and dramatic development.111 Vasconcelos asserts that “Indians” are the inheritors of the lost race of

Atlantis and that their racial characteristics are the key to the improvement of the white race, the “victors of the age” (16). Vasconcelos saw Latin America as uniquely situated for the fusion of all races into a superior and elevated one (20), the “fifth race” (25). For him, education is the source for the “aesthetic eugenics” of taste, which is the marker of the existence of a supreme human race.112 Indians contribute to this race through their superior spiritual and aesthetic capacities (30-32). He writes:

In the contemporary period, while the pride of the present masters of the world

asserts through the mouth of their scientists the ethnic and mental superiority of

the Whites from the north, any teacher can corroborate that the children and youth

descendant from Scandinavians, Dutch, and English found in North American

universities, are much slower, and almost dull, compared with the mestizo

children and youths from the south. (32-33)

111 Vasconcelos identifies four “foundational” races—Indian, Black, White, and Hindu—that have each, he argues, seen their epoch of dominance. In turn, each contributes particular features to what will be “fifth race”—the cosmic race. Despite recognition among scholars that Vasconcelos’ racial theories were in the spirit of challenging the racial hierarchies brought about by modernization and the neoimperialism of the United States, it is important to note that blackness, even for Vasconcelos, was the closest to “irredeemable.” 112 Juliet Hooker observes that “[i]n The Cosmic Race, Vasconcelos contrasted ‘scientific eugenics’ to ‘aesthetic eugenics.’ The former led to condemnations of mixture, while the latter would proceed under the ‘law of personal taste.’ Yet Vasconcelos’s aesthetic eugenics replicated existing racial rankings by incorporating the language of deliberate social selection characteristic of ‘scientific’ eugenics” (164-165). Hooker’s observation underscores the connections between the development of eugenics and the development of educational benchmark early in the twentieth century (See Cathy Davidson, 2017).

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Vasconcelos’s comparison highlights the way in which he links notions of indigeneity with aesthetic educability. He sees aesthetics, and indigenous aesthetics in particular, as the key to a new, national model of education that will bring about a superior rule of law rooted in both “joyful creation” and “Christian ethics” (38). For Vasconcelos, Latin

America’s space of racial crossing is uniquely suited to be the breeding ground (literally) of this new utopian ideal founded on assimilating what he perceives as the aesthetic prowess of the indigenous peoples of America. It is important to emphasize, as John

Ochoa and Juliet Hooker do, that these theories are in conversation with Mexico’s “long history of a national Mexican preoccupation with race” and represent a strand of Latin

American anti-colonial thinking and a riposte to U.S. imperialism that foregrounded

Mexico’s racial history as a contrast to the culture and history of the United States

(Ochoa 116; Hooker 158). Nevertheless, it is undeniable that Vasconcelos troublingly deployed a colonial vision of indigenous identity as the heart of his mestizo utopia.

Given Vasconcelos’s enormous impact on both Mexican (and later, Chicanx and

Latinx) notions of national identity and pedagogy, we cannot fully understand Auxilio’s self-identification with indigeneity in the space of Mexico without his ideas. Ultimately,

Vasconcelos’ pedagogy of indigenismo was (and is) problematic, because it instrumentalized a certain idea of authenticity of indigeneity while eliding the real lives of indigenous people. Yet Auxilio’s claim causes confusion, troubling this tradition of authenticity associated with the Indian in the aesthetic educational space of Mexico. At the same time, Ochoa argues that, for Vasconcelos as a practitioner of education, the implementation of a utopian theory of mestizaje is, by definition “an incomplete version,” and thus “earthly failure becomes a vital part of the ideal” (121). This underscores that

151 embracing “failure,” as I will argue Auxilio does, is an anticolonial stance that re-defines the positivist designation of “failure” as a hopeful and generative tool of individual and communal formation. However, Auxilio’s anticolonial stance takes us further: she fully rejects the conception of learning as a finite and completed (and complete-able) process presupposed by the notion of “failure.” Vasconcelos relied upon a problematic assimilation of indigenous aesthetics and epistemologies, but his epistemology of failure, so formative of the Mexican cultural pedagogy of nationhood, can be seen as a forerunner to Auxilio’s more radical decolonial pedagogy. That her identification as Charrúa confuses all Latin Americans by confusing Mexicans sardonically echoes the view of

Mexico as a stand-in for all of Latin America that was projected by the PRI during the

‘68 Olympic Games as a tactic of nation-building for a global audience. It also satirically echoes the xenophobic rhetoric of the United States.

Auxilio’s self-identification as Charrúa is connected to the multiple instances in which she describes herself alternately as the mother of Mexican poets and of poetry. In tandem with these roles, she refers to her time in the bathroom as attending “el parto de la

Historia,” which the novella as a whole suggests is the Tlatelolco massacre (Amuleto

128). Notably, this phrasing echoes another monument at the Plaza de las tres culturas, one that commemorates the final battle that took place there between the Aztecs and the

Spaniards. It reads, “no fue triunfo ni derrota, fue el doloroso nacimiento del pueblo

152 mestizo que es el Mexico de hoy” (“it was neither a triumph nor a defeat, it was the painful birth of the mestizo nation that is Mexico today”; Figure 3).

Figure 2-3: Birth of the Mestizo Nation. Photo taken by the author, April 8, 2017. The monument exemplifies the elision that Bolaño draws out through Auxilio’s narration: the connection between motherhood and violently disappeared indigeneity in the “birth” of Mexico as a nation of racial mixture, yet stratification. Both motherhood and disappeared indigeneity emphasize how the project of nation-building, which includes the events at Tlatelolco, rested on the elision of women of color and their sexual subjugation. As María Lugones argues:

Modernity organizes the world ontologically in terms of atomic, homogenous,

separable categories. . . . If woman and black are terms for homogenous, atomic,

separable categories, then their intersection shows us the absence of black women

rather than their presence. . . . ‘women’ stands for white women. ‘Black’ stands

for black men. When one is trying to understand women at the intersection of

race, class, and gender, non-white black, mestiza, indigenous, and Asian women

are impossible beings. (742, 757)

153

Auxilio locates her own voice among these “impossible beings,” beings who epistemically and ontologically exist as tare within coloniality-modernity. Though her conception of Auxilio as an Indian and thus an exemplar of a “rural person” in the

“neoliberal city” problematically overlooks this history, Stacey Balkan nevertheless arrives at a similar conclusion to my own. She argues that “Bolaño’s Lacouture . . . represent[s] a specifically Native aesthetic and the [novel offers] what is perhaps the closest thing to a Native syntax. This syntax, of course, is the articulation of the spaces in between, of the margins, of the invisible, of the disappeared” (Balkan 7-8). A more effective and generative way of arriving at this conclusion is by understanding Auxilio as an Anzaldúan mestiza intellectual who has the capacity to examine and contend with her flaws, sit with contradictions and ambiguities, and generate learning out of violence—and in doing so, model this process of learning as witnessing for Bolaño’s audiences. In the bathroom of the UNAM, Auxilio draws the company of impossible and spectral beings at the locus of the colonial and modern wound of Tlatelolco.

Auxilio’s status as an educable subject is critically connected to these tared identities with which she affiliates, particularly in the purportedly colorblind spaces of the university, the state, and within the student movement. We can see how, right from the beginning, she builds her own pedagogy within this space of the borderlands on a grammatical level, pushing back against the grammar of modernity. This pedagogy reveals the tensions within what Oliver describes as the paradox of “bearing witness to one’s own oppression” (99). After introducing herself as Charrúa, Auxilio draws us into her subversion through her claim to motherhood, a claim that subjects her to colonial violence and gendered narrative domination. She explains:

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Yo soy la amiga de todos los mexicanos. Podría decir: soy la madre de la poesía

mexicana, pero mejor no lo digo. Yo conozco a todos los poetas y todos los

poetas me conocen a mí. Así que podría decirlo. Podría decir: soy la madre y

corre un céfico de la chingada desde hace siglos, pero mejor no lo digo. Podría

decir, por ejemplo: yo conocí a Arturito Belano cuando él tenía diecisiete años y

era un niño tímido que escribía obras de teatro y poesía y no sabía beber, pero

sería de algún modo una redundancia y a mí me enseñaron (con un látigo me

enseñaron, con una vara de fierro) que las redundancias sobran y que sólo debe

bastar con el argumento. (Amuleto 9)

I am a friend to all Mexicans. I could say I am the mother of Mexican poetry, but

I better not. I know all the poets and all the poets know me. So I could say it. I

could say one mother of a zephyr is blowing down the centuries, but I better not.

For example, I could say I knew Arturito Belano when he was a shy seventeen-

year-old who wrote plays and poems and couldn’t hold his liquor, but in a sense it

would be superfluous and I was taught (they taught me with a lash and with a rod

of iron) to spurn all superfluities and tell a straightforward story. (Andrews 1)

Bolaño emphasizes the legacy of colonial violence as the framework for Auxilio’s narration by having Auxilio reiterate the concept of Mexican motherhood by using the word, “chingada”—the raped, colonially-collaborating archetype. Furthermore, the education Auxilio receives from the lash and the iron rod to “bastar con el argumento”

(“stick to the plot”) links colonial violence with the banking and deficit-based models of linear narration and passive education. Yet, like Alicia in The Little School, Auxilio

155 reveals that she is a bad student of these lessons, and, like Alicia, she builds a pedagogy that actively deconstructs this legacy.

The first indication of this process is her redundant usage of “yo” (“I”). The conjugation of a Spanish verb leaves the “I” subject implicit; thus, vocalizing “yo” becomes a way to emphasize the self or an action as distinct from an accepted understanding of a situation. I agree with scholar Moira Álvarez, who has argued that this redundancy demonstrates Auxilio’s battle against forgetting in each sentence she articulates, but I also read the redundancy as a mode of transgressive utterance against the colonial lessons of narrative rigidity (428). Visually related, the word “yo” and the letter

“y” (“and”) populate the page as the scattered building blocks of paragraph-long sentences and pages-long paragraphs. The visual effect of these constructive, grammatical elements recalls Anzaldúa’s assertion that “if going home is denied me then

I will have to stand and claim my space, making a new culture—una cultura mestiza— with my own lumber, my own bricks and mortar and my own feminist architecture”

(Borderlands 44). The chain of “y” creates a precarious link between Auxilio’s thoughts and narrated events, giving the impression that they are barely tethered, rather than cleanly and assertively ordered. Put together, “yo” and “y” are indicative of the palimpsestic space from which Auxilio is teaching her audience about what she witnessed. Her use of “podría decir” (“I could say”) further hints at her pedagogy as decolonial formation. The phrase indicates a capacity for narrative control and denaturalizes the boundaries placed around what is told. Far from “bastar con el argumento,” the phrase allows her to narrate what is missing while still, on paper (so to

156 speak), leaving it out. If we read this phrase through the metric of a linear plot, we see her putting her failure on display over and over.

This failure performs what Auxilio announces in the very first words of her narration: that the story she tells will not be understandable through the commonly deployed genres and narratives of Tlatelolco. With the first sentences of the novella,

Auxilio warns her audience that “Ésta será una historia de terror. Será una historia policiaca, un relato de serie negra y de terror. Pero no lo parecerá porque soy yo la que lo cuenta. Soy yo la que habla y por eso no lo parecerá. Pero en el fondo es la historia de un crimen atroz” (“This is going to be a horror story. A story of murder, detection and horror. But it won’t appear to be, for the simple reason that I am the teller. Told by me, it won’t seem like that. Although, in fact, it’s the story of a terrible crime” (Amuleto 9;

Andrews 1). These opening lines simultaneously incorporate and challenge two crucial human rights genres of Latin America: the police procedural and the testimonio. As he does in Los detectives salvajes (1998; The Savage Detectives), Bolaño engages with the pre-Tlatelolco detective fiction literary movement called la Onda (“the Wave”) that centralized Mexico City as a harbor of “secret redoubts and channels, invisible to the superficial observer” (Stavans, Antiheroes 26).113 As a counterpoint, Andreea Marinescu argues, Bolaño incorporates the generic indicators of testimonio in order to challenge the genre’s status among scholars as a “monument to truth” (which, she argues, is what allowed Menchú’s testimonio to be contested on positivist terms; 138). Both genres

113 La Onda included José Agustín, Gustavo Sáinz, and Carlos Fuentes (Stavans 15). Ilan Stavans observes that the “subgenre” gained new momentum after Tlatelolco, when the police state of Mexico entered a new level of structural violence (42).

157 challenge notions of authority and experience, but in the case of Tlatelolco, they are entwined in Tlatelolco’s myth of student sacrifice as democratic progress.

Yet Auxilio undermines her own authority to tell a story in either genre, establishing that her narration will not be recognizable as a telling of Tlatelolco under the metrics of these genres. By having Auxilio question her own authority to tell the story of atrocity, Bolaño demonstrates the pressure placed on victims and on witnesses (Auxilio embodies both) to make their testimonies “narratable” to audiences, as Kay Schaffer and

Sidonie Smith argue of personal narratives that are circulated in the field of human rights

(2004). Gillian Whitlock asks even more pointedly, “[H]ow does indigenous experience, knowledge, and resistance become ‘narratable’ as a testimonial discourse and accrue value . . . ?” (208). Bolaño seemed aware that “narratable” usually means “marketable,” even when a text is written as a political and artistic intervention.114 The legal metrics employed by these genres of narration can bring about the erasure of the experience, knowledge, and resistance of women of color. Auxilio, however, announces that she will fail to make the story seem like what it is “supposed” to be—a failure that, I argue, is a generative element of her pedagogy.

This purposeful failure is also directed at the archetypes of femininity as an indication of a fundamental deficiency and ineducability. Emily Hind addresses these archetypes through what she calls “boob lit,” or the negation of female intellectualism.

She observes that the word “boob” captures the connotations of “a stupid awkward person, a ‘simpleton,’ a ‘boor,’” moving from “those with weak minds to a visible

114 The perceived tension between “authentic” artistic innovation and marketability is part of what confounds and compels scholars about Bolaño himself. See Castellanos-Moya (2009) and Jean Franco (2009).

158 characteristic of women’s bodies. This slide illustrates the metonymic threat of having breasts: a person with boobs is always at risk of becoming one” (8). She observes that

“boob” applies to Mexican culture not only because breasts, chichis, are also called bubis, but because the slang for them, teta—used pejoratively its masculine form, teto—also puns on weak minds/women’s bodies by linking “boob” to an awkward person with deficient intellectual or social skills (8). We can read Auxilio as a “boob” in both senses, then: as a narrator who appropriates these common tropes of Mexican female educability by appearing to model them.

Throughout Amuleto, Auxilio commentates on her own intelligence or stupidity as she works to understand and communicate her time in the UNAM bathroom.

“Definitivamente,” she declares in the midst of narrative that is clearly anything but definitive, “yo creo que llegué en 1965 (pero puede que me equivoque, una casi siempre se equivoca)” (“Yes, it must have been 1965 [although I could be mistaken, it certainly wouldn’t be the first time]”; Amuleto 10; Andrews 2). Demonstrating precisely the trend that Emily Hind observes of reading these traits in women as a deficiency, Salvador

Oroposa argues that Auxilio is “a flawed” character and a “weak woman,” and further argues that this characterization is crucial to the novella’s success in “representing the triumph of neoliberalism. The message is that neoliberalism thrives in an underdeveloped civil society in which the progressive weakening of patriarchy is not accompanied by a strengthening of women’s agency” (77). Oroposa’s reading exemplifies the result of reading Auxilio through the liberal metrics of educability that characterize coloniality- modernity.

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Following Ochoa’s argument that failure as a trope within Mexican identity is “a form of knowledge,” I read Auxilio’s performance of failure as what Walter Mignolo calls “epistemic disobedience” to the metrics of linearity and deficit that characterize the remembrance-pedagogy of modernity and of Tlatelolco (4; “Epistemic Disobedience”

45). This performance, however, is not an indication of an untrustworthy and “failed” narrator, but an indication of a narrator in the process of building knowledge through instability and mistakes. Auxilio’s use of the term “definitivamente” stakes a place in narration and in time against the current of the rest of her testimony, which she grants

(both assertively and self-deprecatingly) is likely riddled with mistakes. As Álvarez argues in the case of Auxilio’s usage of the redundant “yo,” this term anchors her against the current of forgetting and the current of the Tlatelolco memory-making process as one of deficit. The tension mapped in that sentence courses through another set of repeated phrases throughout the novella: “lo único que sé” (“the only thing I know”) and “lo único cierto” (“the only thing that’s certain”). Her repetition of “tal vez” (“perhaps”) similarly undermines the stability and certainty of her place and reason for being in Mexico City.

Police histories and detective fiction start in this way, with an absence of certainty in knowledge and with volatile, mutable narrations of explanation for the “crimen atroz” (9)

(“atrocious crime”) at their centers. But Auxilio has alerted her readers that she is not like other narrators; she both knows more than she tells and tells more than she knows. Her narration is threaded with behaviors that a linear, positivist reading would understand as

“failures.” These “failures” stabilize Auxilio’s learning process, a process that necessarily works against a clear progression from absence to revelation. Auxilio’s story thus

160 becomes “narratable” and “reliable” when we read it as learning-in-process, rather than learning as a complete and finished epistemology.

In the space of nepantla, Auxilio’s “failures” are a way of stabilizing herself within that landscape of time. This form of narration is in the vein of what Anzaldúa calls the “Coyolxauhqui imperative” of writing, destruction, and self-(re)formation. For

Anzaldúa, the fragmentation and dissociation Auxilio displays would be indicative that

Auxilio has entered a state of being in the borderlands that is a crucial prelude to re- formation. She explains that:

The Coyolxauhqui115 imperative is to heal and achieve integration. When

fragmentations occur, you fall apart and feel as though you’ve been expelled from

paradise. Coyolxauhqui is my symbol for the necessary process of

dismemberment and fragmentation, of seeing that self or the situations you’re

embroiled in differently. Coyolxauhqui is also my symbol for reconstruction and

reframing, one that allows for putting the pieces together in a new way. The

Coyolxauhqui imperative is an ongoing process of making and unmaking. There

is never any resolution, just the process of healing. (Light in the Dark 19-20)

Auxilio’s narration does demonstrate traits of narrative representations of trauma—traits that have historically been used to dismiss the efficacy of victims’ accounts of violence.116 For example, Auxilio’s narration is in present tense, slipping between the immediate location of trauma and the memories around it; it includes verbal “tics” (such

115 In Aztec mythology, Coyolxuahqui is the daughter of the goddess Coatlicue and the sister of Huizilopochtli, who, when he was born, cut off Coyolxuahqui’s limbs and threw her decapitated head into the sky. Her head became the moon. 116 See Dori Laub and Shoshana Felman (1992).

161 as “Yo”) that help propel her telling; and it captures a disordered account of events that is full of contradictions and focuses on what seem to be banalities rather than “the main event.” Understood as a literary enactment of a Coyolxauhqui learning process, Amuleto provides a model of writing and learning one’s way forward while in the midst of such trauma. For example, near the end of her time in the bathroom, Auxilio narrates a cycle of writing her fragmented thoughts on toilet paper, then flushing them down the toilet in fear, reflecting the larger process of her narrating her “failures” and false starts. To her, as it is to Anzaldúa, the process is inextricable from the rhythms of living:

Pensé: porque escribí, resistí. Pensé: porque destruí lo escrito me van a descubrir,

me van a pegar, me van a violar, me van a matar. Pensé: ambos hechos están

relacionados, escribir y destruir, ocultarse y ser descubierta. Luego me senté en el

trono y cerré los ojos. Luego me dormí. Luego me desperté. (Amuleto 120-121)

I thought, Because I wrote, I endured. I thought, Because I destroyed what I had

written, they will find me, they will hit me, they will rape me, they will kill me. I

thought, The two things are connected, writing and destroying, hiding and being

found. Then I sat down on the throne and shut my eyes. I fell asleep. Then I woke

up again. (Andrews 175)

The fragmentation of writing and destroying, syntactically emphasized here by the short, direct phrases and conjugations, is ultimately part of the holistic process of Auxilio’s telling. The holistic nature of this process is emphasized by the absence of her usage of the redundant “yo.” We can recognize Auxilio’s embodied process of writing as one of living and of learning by reading it alongside Anzaldúa’s own narration of what writing means to her. She reflects, “Soy la que escribe y se escribe / I am the one who writes and

162 who is being written. Últimamente es el escribir que me escribe / It is the writing that

‘writes’ me. I ‘read’ and ‘speak’ myself into being. Writing is the site where I critique reality, identity, language, and dominant culture’s representation and ideological control”

(Light in the Dark 3). As Anzaldúa suggests of her own writing, Auxilio is narrating her way through the trauma wrought by modernity by using its counterpoint of decolonial learning. Her “new mestiza” pedagogy alerts us to the problems with a narrative that formally (and formulaically) plots a national Bildungsroman, with its liberal notion of a developed, individual subjecthood, as a benchmark for remembrance. Auxilio reveals the

“crimen atroz” at the heart of the novel to be not only the violence at Tlatelolco, but also the way in which a deficit narrative of martyrdom and sacrifice becomes learned, remembered, and instrumentalized.

The form of Auxilio’s learning process, represented through the space of the novella, is, like the space of Tlatelolco itself, that of the palimpsest. M. Jacqui Alexander turns to the concept of the palimpsest to describe a narrative that is structured against the

Manichean binaries and exclusivities of modernity. She writes that “[t]hese different narrations of time, these ‘perverse modernities’ (to use Lisa Lowe and Judith

Halberstam’s felicitous phrase) unravel that which has been normalized and normativized in modernity’s desire to be seen as a single homogenous project” (191). Auxilio’s narrative structures precisely this model of unravelling, self-interruption, and constant revision while she occupies the borderlands, the space of the UNAM bathroom. For example, she narrates, “Yo llegué a México Distrito Federal en el año 1967 o tal vez en el año 1965 o 1962. Yo ya no me acuerdo ni de las fechas ni de los peregrinajes, lo único que sé es que llegué a México y ya no me volví a marchar. A ver, que haga un poco de

163 memoria” (“I came to Mexico City in 1967, or maybe it was 1965, or 1962. I’ve got no memory for dates anymore, or exactly where my wanderings took me; all I know is that I came to Mexico and never went back. Hold on, let me try to remember” Amuleto 12;

Andrews 2). Auxilio’s constant revision of not only the dates of her narration but also her own relationship to memory reflects, formally, the censorship and reiterative narrative of sacrifice at Tlatelolco. More than simply representing the narrative structure of censorship, however, Auxilio narrates a process of learning that undermines it, one that, like the Plaza de las tres culturas, visually includes all traces and tracings of the past and makes space for future revisions.

It is easy to understand why this unravelling, this insistence on simultaneity and heterogeneity, is read as a traumatic totality. I agree that Auxilio’s narration indicates the presence of trauma, but reading it as a totalizing trauma presupposes that her trauma is in an essentialized, finished form—like the mythology of student sacrifice at Tlatelolco.

When read through the lens of the mestiza, however, these qualities become part of the pluralistic mode of her artistic process within the borderlands, in which “nothing is thrust out, the good the bad and the ugly, nothing rejected, nothing abandoned. Not only does

[the mestiza] sustain contradictions, she turns the ambivalence into something else”

(Borderlands 101). Auxilio, too, abandons no part of her narration process—not her questions, her confusions, or her unfocused and unsure allusions. For Celina Manzoni, these traits indicate Bolaño’s use of an age-old aesthetic of fragmentation by “blowing it up” into a new totality (Manzoni 28). Manzoni reads the bathroom in which Auxilio is fortified as a Borgesian “aleph” from which all temporal possibilities can be explored

(29). I agree with Manzoni’s reading; indeed, Bolaño was famously a fan of Borges and

164 is equally as cerebral a writer. When further understood through Anzaldúa’s framework, who also describes nepantla (the borderlands) as Borges’ “aleph,” 117 Auxilio’s trauma becomes a stage in an ongoing, generative process of formation rather than a foreclosing totality. She is not simply expressing an experience of trauma that forecloses her ability to narrate “clearly” or “reliably” from a position of deficit. She is an agent within this unravelling; she is actively rewriting, remediating—remedying—an essentializing and totalizing structure.118

In this way, we can read Amuleto as a formal, literary instantiation of a palimpsest—a space that foregrounds ongoing processes of narration. The palimpsest can accommodate multiple modes and modalities of learning and remembrance. As such, a palimpsest positions the educability of its audiences differently; it allows for co-creation, questions, and revisions of remembrance. This palimpsestic literary pedagogy resonates with Anzaldúa’s own description of her writing process and the kind of text it is intended to produce:

My task is to guide readers and give them the space to co-create, often against the

grain of culture, family, and ego injunctions, against external and internal

censorship, against the dictates of genes. . . . This text questions its own

formalizing and ordering attempts, its own strategies, the machinations of thought

itself, of theory formulated on an experiential level of discourse. . . . It enters into

117 Anzaldúa writes, “I think of the borderlands as Jorge Luis Borges’s Aleph, the one spot on earth containing all other places within it” (Light in the Dark 57). 118 In line with thinking of Auxilio as a “boob,” “remediation” also evokes “remedial”—a pedagogical term used for individuals who are considered deficient according to a particular metric and require additional attention to “catch up.”

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the dialogue between the new story and the old and attempts to revise the master

story. (Light in the Dark 7)

Within Amuleto, Bolaño engages in a number of multi-modal layers of revising and remediating the “master story” of the sacrificial narrative of modernity of Tlatelolco. The novella itself is a revision and expansion of a vignette in Los detectives salvajes (1998).

Additionally, scholars have noted that Amuleto rewrites a number of intertexts including

Borges’s “El Aleph,” Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo, and Marcel Schwob’s The Children’s

Crusade (1898).119 Such intertexts are often discussed alongside Bolaño’s tendency to introduce real historical figures (including himself) into his fiction as “games” that

Bolaño plays with his readers.120 However, in the context of the remembrance of a massacre that occurred in connection to the 1968 Olympic Games, the ethical implications of such narrative “games” are more loaded. As a representation of Mexico’s entrance into the linear progression of modernity, the Olympic Games rationalized a repression that, as Ryan Long effectively phrases it, “not only exposed the limitations of that claim, but also of the teleological thinking underpinning the very notion of an entrance into modernity” (“Traumatic Time” 130). Considered in this context, Bolaño’s narrative “games” become an intervention into the Olympics’ public pedagogy of

119 See Cristian Crusat (2009) and Andreea Marinescu (2013). I would also add Borges’s story, “Funes el Memorioso” (1944; trans. “Funes the Memorious”). At one point, Auxilio declares “Yo soy el recuerdo” (“I am the memory”; Amuleto 120), echoing Funes’s inability to forget anything as well as the narrator’s repeated refrain of “recuerdo” (“I remember”). 120 See, for example, Sánchez-Fernandez (133), who discusses Bolaño’s games of doubled and hidden identities, and Mryna Soloterevsky, who argues that through these identities, what she calls “pseudo-real referents,” Bolaño plays “the game of instability and decentralization” that “cheat[s] the candid reader” (250). Soloterevsky’s argument reflects the trend among scholars engaging in the intersection of human rights and literature to take an antagonistic position to readers’ educability.

166 modernity, a pedagogy that revealed itself as the repression and elision of those deemed tare to its ends.

Amuleto does not only contain remediations of well-known literary works; through Auxilio, Bolaño ekphrastically remediates graphical and aural narratives that would have been prevalent in Mexico City in the Long Sixties. As part of the movement, students enacted a counter-rhetoric to that of the PRI’s hailing of modernity through a massive graphic arts campaign promulgated by Consejo Nacional de Huelga (CNH;

National Strike Council) student groups called brigadas (brigades).121 These campaigns included a number of common graphical tropes. One of them was the iconic graphic of

Che Guevara, for them the ultimate galvanizing symbol of masculine sacrifice. Che does make an appearance in Amuleto, but only to be evaluated as a lover. Auxilio, who sleeps with many of the poets in the literary underground, discusses these sexual encounters with another female artist, Lillian Serpas, who is known to have slept with Che. Serpas’s verdict? “Normal. Eso era todo” (“He was normal, that was all”) (Amuleto 87; Andrews

122). Bolaño undoes the virility of Che as a symbol of masculine sacrifice and revolution by foregrounding the simultaneous sexuality and intellectualism of these women. In contrast, Salvador Oropesa reads Auxilio’s sexuality and Lillian’s evaluation of Che’s bedroom prowess as evidence of their “weak womanhood” and submission to a neoliberal order, lamenting that “[t]he only concern about Che is how good a lover he was. Castro and Che are just pieces of the neoliberal wax museum of the revolution” (88). If anything, Oropesa’s complaint is further evidence that, in remedying the Tlatelolco

121 As a sixteen-year-old in Mexico City, Bolaño would have been right in the midst of this atmosphere.

167 mythology by foregrounding the voices of women who do not fit into its archetypes,

Bolaño has clearly hit a cultural soft spot (so to speak).

Bolaño includes two further remediations of iconic student movement graphics in

Figure 2-4: Example of student poster that includes the book trope. Scanned from Imágenes y símbolos del 68. Auxilio’s narration. One of the tropes students used repeatedly after the PRI crackdowns started was that of student holding a book while being victimized by soldiers (Figure 4).

This image was itself a re-appropriation of PRI propaganda, which often presented an image of a student, book in hand, being used as a shield by the supposed terrorists and communists who were behind the student movement (Carey 45). During her thirteen-day stay in the university bathroom, Auxilio’s only possession is a book of poetry by a well- known Spanish poet. When she realizes that the army has entered the campus and she is alone and trapped in the bathroom, she responds by subjecting this book of poetry to a furious reading, observing that the book “apenas pudo resistir (hay poetas y poemas que resisten cualquier lectura, otros, la mayoría, no)” (“could not withstand that free-fall reading [some poets and poems can withstand any kind of reading, but they are rare exceptions; most can’t]”) (Amuleto 25; Andrews 28). Rory O’Bryen reads this scene as

Bolaño’s assertion that “poetry and literature are not dead” (483). However, I read this scene as a remediation of precisely the idea of literature O’Bryen’s reading advances, one

168 that sees literature as the once-sturdy pillar of traditional “culture.” By ekphrastically depicting this ubiquitous student protest imagery, Auxilio emphasizes the way her mestiza process of reading—of learning—pushes against traditional (and colonial) institutions, those upheld by armies and poets alike.

The second recurrent graphical image remediated into Amuleto is that of the bird, particularly the dove. The PRI used the image of the dove as its icon for the 1968

Olympic Games as the Mexican “Games of Peace.” The CNH adopted this image, portraying it in connection with its call for public dialogue or as a bleeding dove run

Figure 2-5: Example of student protest poster with dove image. Scanned from Imágenes y símbolos del 68. through by a bayonet. Both usages emphasized the dissonance between the “peace” the dove supposedly proclaimed and the violent absence of that dialogue (Figure 5).122

The image of a bird, or its egg, often weaves into Auxilio’s narrations of her temporal unravellings and re-orderings, suggesting a corollary to the “motherhood” she both

122 In his review of a stage adaptation of 2666, Hilton Als beautifully reflects on the role of dialogue in Bolaño’s literary work: “Bolaño, that gawky, sensitive son of machismo’s brutalities and bigotry, saw everywhere—force winning out over dialogue, no matter how carefully rendered” (“Bookworms”).

169 adopts and witnesses. At the end of the novel, Auxilio enters a valley that she has envisioned throughout the course of her narration in the bathroom. She notices two birds—a quetzal and a sparrow—sitting in this otherwise silent valley. Together, the three of them appear to be the only living things in the valley until Auxilio sees “una inacabable legion de jóvenes que se dirigía a alguna parte” (“an interminable legion of young people on the march to somewhere”) (Amuleto 124; Andrews 180). These birds, the surrounding silence, and their portent of the arrival of the young people evoke the image of the dove that the students attributed with public dialogue, along with the singularity of how those students would come to be remembered.

This final remediation, then, draws together Auxilio’s status as a learner among the student movements and as a mestiza intellectual building her own pedagogy of remembrance for this legion of young people. This conjunction is a bookend to one that occurs in the beginning of the novella, during Auxilio’s description of herself as a laborer in the space of the UNAM. She narrates, “Yo por el día vivía en la Facultad, como una hormiguita o más propiamente como una cigarra, de un lado para otro, de un cubículo a otro cubículo, al tanto de todos los chismes, de todas las infidelidades y divorcios, al tande de todas las tragedias” (“I spent my days at the faculty, busy as a bee or, to be more precise, a cicada, coming and going in and out of the little offices, keeping up with all the gossip, all the affairs and divorces, keeping up with all the tragedies”) (Amuleto 19;

Andrews 17). At first Auxilio calls herself an ant. While Andrews translates this as a

“busy bee,” in either case it evokes a sense of a mindless, laboring drone. Auxilio then corrects herself (rewrites herself) and calls herself a cicada. As a literary metaphor, the cicada tends to represent rebirth and renewal, a cycle that cancels “heroics” in favor of

170 persistence—a symbolic gesture that aligns with Auxilio’s palimpsestic narrative and pedagogy. The cicada also makes a specific historical homage to student protesters of this era through the song, “Como la cigarra,” by the Argentine composer María Elena

Walsh.123 The song begins:

Tantas veces me mataron

Tantas veces me morí,

Sin embargo estoy aquí

Resucitando

So many times they killed me

So many times I died

Still, here I am

Coming back to life again

The song speaks to the spirit of imminence embodied by the student movements of the

Long Sixties. In the context of Tlatelolco, the song underscores the spectrality of the students’ presence. Auxilio, a narrator identified with women of color who similarly embody resilience to recursive violence, aligns herself with these “impossible beings,” these student ghosts, as she calls them. She narrates listening to their song even while the ghostly figures fall off the edge of an abyss, which brings us to the last sentence of the novella:

Así pues los muchachos fantasmas cruzaron el valle y se despeñaron en el abismo.

Un tránsito breve. Y su canto fantasma o el eco de su canto fantasma, que es

123 This is the same composer whose song, “El país de nomeacuerdo” (“The Country of I-Don’t- Remember”), is a crucial intertext in the film La historia oficial.

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como decir el eco de la nada, siguió marchando al mismo paso que ellos, aunque

era el paso del valor y de la generosidad, en mis oídos. Una canción apenas

audible, un canto de guerra y de amor, porque los niños sin duda se dirigían hacia

la guerra pero lo hacían recordando las actitudes teatrales y soberanas del amor. . .

. Y ese canto es nuestro amuleto. (Amuleto 126-127)

So the ghost-children marched down the valley and fell into the abyss. Their

passage was brief. And their ghost-song or its echo, which is almost to say the

echo of nothingness, went on marching, I could hear it marching on at the same

pace, the pace of courage and generosity. A barely audible song, a song of war

and love, because although the children were clearly marching to war, the way

they marched recalled the superb, theatrical attitudes of love. . . . And that song is

our amulet. (Andrews 185)

In this way, the revisions that construct Auxilio’s palimpsestic narrative lead us, finally, to the amulet of the novella’s title. The students are lost, yet remain through their song as

“living dead,” as participants in her learning process. The amulet of their song provides protection against, I would argue, the instrumentalization of their loss. Thus, Auxilio’s pedagogy directs us away from a positivist metric of trauma and history and toward a place where mourning sits comfortably not only with pain, but also with love, and even with pleasure.

AUXILIO FOR THE PEDAGOGY OF WITNESS

In Amuleto, Bolaño conceptualizes a pedagogical space much like the plaza of

Tlatelolco, a palimpsestic space whose visitors are able to constantly remediate memory.

Like the graphical intertext of the dove, the final lines of the novella foreground

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Auxilio’s identity as a witness and learner of the events at Tlatelolco, directly inviting audiences to reflect upon their own roles as witnesses and learners. As Marinescu has observed, “Instead of examining the reliability of the witness, the readers are asked to concentrate on the discursive strategies employed and what they reveal about the horrors witnessed” (141). But we cannot forget that the triumph of Amuleto as an artistic work and political critique is rooted in the decolonial thinking of a woman of color. While she offers a model of witness-as-learning for audiences, Auxilio also troubles notions of witnessing that overlook the racial and gendered hegemonic structures of power at work in how narratives of human rights atrocity are rendered through generic codes as true, as

“reliable,” to audiences. In her conceptualization of witnessing, Kelly Oliver frames this as a need to acknowledge “the differences in power and authority in different social positions” (108). In this way, Auxilio draws our attention to the challenges that come with employing the term “witness” in a pedagogical framework that aspires beyond a banking one.

To demonstrate this point, and by way of concluding, I return to the work of

Roger Simon and Claudia Eppert on pedagogy and remembrance. While I have drawn a connection between remembrance and pedagogy through their research, their work also highlights the way that the language of witnessing, in the context of a remembrance pedagogy that relies on a shared deficit-based framework with legal rhetoric, can lead to this elision. Simon and Eppert center their essay on pedagogy and witnessing on an epigraph from Emmanuel Lévinas: “True learning consists in receiving the lesson so deeply that it becomes a necessity to give oneself to the other. The lesson of truth is not

173 held in one . . . consciousness. It explodes toward the other”124 (“Remembering

Obligation” 50). From Lévinas, they extrapolate a set of obligations, what I read as performance metrics of what they call “pedagogical witnessing.” These include,

“indicating to others that what one has seen and heard is worthy of remembrance”;

“indicat[ing] how the remembrance informs one’s contemporary perceptions and actions”; and “transporting and translating these stories beyond their moment of enunciation” (53). These obligations and implicit metrics of witnessing come from a place of concern for amplifying the voices of those who have undergone violence, whether personal or structural. But I find something in the authors’ engagement with

Lévinas that locates “witness” in a position of hegemonic, structural privilege, essentializing victims as the medium rather than agent of this pedagogy by locating the

“authenticity” of the narrating subject in their trauma and victimhood—in the inherent absence of their capacity to claim worthiness, to transport their stories.125 In other words, by not thinking through how their pedagogical structure establishes the educability of learners, Simon and Eppert stage a pedagogy of what Oliver would call “false witness”

(107).

This problem becomes clear if it is applied to a context of racial and postcolonial injustice, where the demand to give oneself to the other becomes, if one is, for example, a black or mestiza person, a reification of those colonial relations of power. As Anzaldúa’s writing powerfully reminds us, women of color have been asked to “fully give” themselves to liberal structures of power for centuries, whether to enable the liberalism

124 The citation comes from Levinas’s In the Time of the Nations (1994), page 80. 125 One reason for my reading is that in another essay by Claudia Eppert, “Relearning Questions: Responding to the Ethical Address of Past and Present Others,” she posits a troubling equivalency between “narrative of historical witness,” “trauma literature,” and “ethnic literature” (215).

174 that erases them as tare to humanity, or to essentialize themselves as the “teachers” of a liberal white public who position their own “deficit” of knowledge about people of color as a means of maintaining supremacy. Either way, the pedagogical relation remains one of instrumentalization—even more so when audiences of literature become cast as such false witnesses. In their exuberance to draw a fruitful connection between remembrance and pedagogy, Simon and Eppert lose sight of the most crucial element of a pedagogy of witness, which, in contrast, Oliver’s reading highlights: Lévinas’s imperative for vigilant listening to silence is “to ‘recognize’ the unrecognizable in the process of witnessing itself, to recognize that you cannot expect to recognize otherness” (133). For an example of how such a “pedagogical witness” would take shape on a national level in a modern-

(post)colonial construct of remembrance, we need only look at Tlatelolco’s overdetermined narrative of sacrifice.

My point is that it is a slippery slope between the ethical and instrumental deployments of “witness” in a pedagogical framework that remains implicit, as is so often the case in scholarship on human rights literature. As I discussed in my introduction, it is not my intention to argue that we jettison “witness” entirely from our literary vocabulary.

I do think, however, that Amuleto demonstrates how other epistemologies and their formations reveal themselves if we rigorously explore the pedagogical orientations of, as

Anzaldúa says, “response in responsibility” (Borderlands 42). In redirecting the remembrance of Tlatelolco through a feminist of color pedagogy, Amuleto, above all, demonstrates the urgency of making space for these forms learning and remembrance in efforts to rupture the cycles of colonial and neo-imperial violence.

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CHAPTER THREE

WRITING OUT OF THE OBITUARY: PUERTO RICAN INDEBTEDNESS AND POETIC LEARNING

ON TATAS and TEACHINGS

Tata

Mi abuela

has been

in this dept store

called america

for the past twenty-five years

She is eighty-five years old

and does not speak a word of english

That is intelligence

- Pedro Pietri, Puerto Rican Obituary (105)

“Tata” is, at first glance, an unassuming poem within Pietri’s 1973 collection, Puerto

Rican Obituary. In eight short lines, however, the poem achieves two things: it locates

Puerto Rican experience within the liberal market structures of daily life in the United

States, and it invokes and ruptures the effects of the colonial relations between the mainland and Puerto Rico. Tata is a Puerto Rican term of endearment for a respected and beloved family figure—in this case, the speaker’s grandmother. The America she inhabits is the abbreviation of a department store (as a woman of color, she is not offered the

176 space of the entire word). Such stores rely on the labor of women like the abuela to peddle the glossy imagery of “American” life, cushioned in holiday sales and perfumed by branded promises of luxury. As the abuela’s space of labor and of living (in Spanish,

“dept” can also be an abbreviation for departamento, an apartment), the “dept store” sells a lifestyle that both excludes her and depends upon her. The metaphor of the “dept store” links the United States as a space of consumerism to the long history of exploitative labor in and of Puerto Rico, from its days as a Spanish colonial outpost to its ongoing status as a commonwealth of the United States.126 Indeed, given Pietri’s penchant for playful syntax and spoken-visual performance, it is no accident that when read aloud or glanced over quickly, “dept” slides easily into “debt,” visually and linguistically linking the reliance (and often the outcome) of consumer culture on the labor of Puerto Ricans and on colonial relations with Puerto Rico. With the phrase “dept store,” Pietri identifies the condition of debt in relations between the United States and Puerto Rico as an economic, social, and cultural framework. The shiny “American Dream” promises sold at the department store obscure the indebtedness of that market to those who provide this labor.

126 Puerto Rico has been subjected to an uninterrupted chain of colonial oppression, from the arrival of Columbus and the Spanish at the end of the fifteenth century to the twenty- and twenty-first-century U.S. policies that have subjugated Puerto Rican bodies for the causes of military and economic labor. These policies began with the Treaty of Paris of 1898 that ceded Puerto Rico, along with Guam and the Philippines, to the United States. They evolved into the Jones-Shafroth Act (1917) that enabled the conscription of Puerto Ricans into the military during World War I and the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964 that aimed to give impoverished Americans the opportunity to “develop skills, continue education, and find useful work” (Johnson 182). Conscription during the World Wars as well as economic legislation encouraged Puerto Ricans to move to the mainland to find work. They did so in droves, but they found that the same structures of colonialism shaping the mainland’s relation with the island operated within the infrastructures of poverty on the mainland. Due to Puerto Rico’s colonial status, the island became a hub for low wage-workers and tax-exempt manufacturers and corporations. When combined with policies such as the Merchant Marine Act (or the Jones Act), NAFTA, and corporate bond-peddling, this status paved the way for Puerto Rico’s more than 70 billion dollar debt today. As journalist, historian, and former Young Lords Party activist Juan González put it in an interview with Democracy Now, “What has actually been happening in Puerto Rico for decades is that corporate America has been raping its most valuable product—human labor” (“Juan González”). For an excellent account of this history, as well as its effect on Puerto Rican migration to New York City, see Julio Morales (1986).

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But the poem is not a lament; it is an encomium. The first seven lines suggest a condemnation of the abuela’s linguistic ability, a critique she would likely have encountered regularly. The final line—“That is intelligence”—reveals this condemnation to be satirical by inverting the implicit value placed on her lack of spoken English. We cannot know if the abuela does not speak English because she has not learned it, or if she simply refuses to speak it; the reason for her choice belongs only to her. By a “dept store” metric of intelligence, the abuela’s choice to speak English would signify her acquiescence to the racial capitalist framework127 of the United States and global markets. With the final line of the poem, that metric of “intelligence” is subverted and reversed. Standing in isolation from the rest of the poem, the line doubly asserts a sense of disobedience through its place on the page and through the oppositional emphasis of its grammar (“That is intelligence,” my emphasis). The line anchors the abuela’s intelligence as a rock planted insistently against a river’s current, disrupting a long history of subjection. One might read “Tata” and think that Pietri is romanticizing his abuela’s ability to survive in the United States without learning English. But such a reading overlooks how Pietri specifically links the abuela’s Spanish to intelligence and brings it into relief against an economy that qualifies her resilience as ignorance. Through the line, “That is intelligence,” Pietri shifts the metrics of knowledge upon which this economy operates. In this social space built from and toward indebtedness, the abuela

127 My use of the term racial capitalism draws primarily from Jodi Melamed (2011) and José Fusté (2017). Melamed builds on Cedric Robinson’s theory of racial capitalism in Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition, and argues that articulations of racial difference are a technology of liberal modernity in the United States. Racialization, she writes, is a process that “naturalizes the privileges of those who benefit from present socioeconomic arrangements and makes the dispossessions of those cut off from wealth and institutional power appear fair” (2). Similarly, José Fusté identifies Puerto Rico as one of many territorial “laboratories” for U.S. neoimperialism and the neoliberal expansionism of U.S. companies through the development of racial and colonial capitalism (109).

178 emerges as a “Nuyorganic” intellectual within a market-driven positivist metric of learning.128

“Tata” succinctly and masterfully draws together the cultural and economic indebtedness enacted by racial capitalism with the banking pedagogical framework of deficit implicit in liberal frameworks of human rights. José Fuste’s comments on racial- colonial capitalism, as the operative technology of U.S. neoimperialism, foreground this same connection. He argues that racial-colonial capitalism “relies on divide-and-rule effects in which some groups benefit from the marginalization of other groups, while liberalism and its reliance on a legal subject that is purportedly colorless and colorblind disallows group rights and delegitimizes reparations for broad constituencies affected by colonialism” (Fusté 109). Fusté’s formulation helps to highlight how “Tata” reveals the shared structures of indebtedness, racial capitalism, and the taring (the spectralization) of

“othered” subjects for whom liberal human rights discourses ostensibly account. The incorporation/erasure that “Tata” stages is not unrelated to what Joseph Slaughter has discussed as the incorporative logic of human rights legal rhetoric. To reiterate part of my discussion of his work in my introduction, Slaughter’s analysis highlights a double meaning of incorporation: that which unifies distinct bodies under a single whole, and that which infuses bodies with meaning only as part of that whole. This doubled meaning makes the incorporated body both the vessel for, and measurement of, human rights.

Within this logic, which is shared and enabled by the genre of the Bildungsroman, the

128 “Nuyorganic intellectual” is a term developed by Regina Bernard-Carreño, cleverly modifying Antonio Gramsci’s term, “organic intellectual,” to express the way in which Nuyorican poetics form notions of selfhood (40).

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“human rights personality” is established through a deficit-based model of formation, one that Paulo Freire identifies as a banking pedagogy.

The positivist metric of educability underlying the legal rhetoric of human rights, which Pietri so effectively satirizes, can also be identified as an undercurrent of discussions surrounding Puerto Rico and its debt, which has reached new heights in the past few years. The U.S. Congress passed H.R. 4900, known as PROMESA, to create an oversight board that explicitly locks out any involvement of Puerto Rican officials in financial decision-making. The language and structure of the act reveals that lawmakers erroneously understand the debt as the result of poor individual choices taken under equitable circumstances, or as the result of poor Puerto Rican government management.

Scholar and activist responses to this crisis, as well as to the bill, have counteracted this assessment by foregrounding the colonial history and ongoing colonial status of Puerto

Rico as crucial for understanding the debt.129 Hurricanes Irma and María have created a full-blown humanitarian disaster and made the colonial condition of Puerto Rico the subject of global headlines. The situation has made plain to the broader public that, as

Yarimar Bonilla writes in an article for the Washington Post, “Vulnerability is not simply a product of natural conditions; it is a political state and a colonial condition.” Journalists, artists, scholars, and activists have organized public symposia and initiatives that document the effects of the debt, as well as identify modes of resilience and resistance within the Puerto Rican community.130 We can return to “Tata’s” willful learning, and to

129 See, for example, Frances Negrón-Muntaner (2017), Ed Morales (2016), Peter James Hudson (2014), Pedro Cabán (2017), and José Fusté (2017). 130 See the conference proceedings of “Narratives of Debt” (2017) hosted by NYU and Columbia’s working group on Unpayable Debt (Negrón-Muntaner and Muir), as well as the proceedings of Princeton’s colloquium on “Bankruptcy and Citizenship: Puerto Rico, a 21st Century Colony?” (2017). Examples of public and artistic initiatives include the “Puerto Rico Syllabus: Essential tools for critical thinking about

180 the rest of Pietri’s collection, for another form of resistance to an instructional framework of indebtedness and a formation of resilience for those living within it.

“Tata” reflects the way in which Pietri’s collection Puerto Rican Obituary identifies and ruptures the implicit pedagogies of market-driven spaces by establishing and enacting a different claim to human rights educability. Encompassing department stores, neighborhoods, and schools, these spaces are organized to produce the liberal subjects imagined by the PROMESA bill and consumer capitalism. Both “Tata” and current discussions about Puerto Rican debt identify indebtedness as an economic, cultural, and intellectual subjectivity of lack that is perpetual and unpayable. This status enables the ongoing subjugation of racialized and laboring subjects within consumer capitalism. In this chapter, I argue that through Puerto Rican Obituary, Pietri identifies this pedagogy of indebtedness as a tool of racial capitalism that leads to the cultural, economic, and physical death of Puerto Ricans. Pietri’s poetic articulation of indebtedness as a cultural pedagogy prefigures an underlying but unaddressed framework for contemporary debates about Puerto Rican indebtedness in the twenty-first century.

Scholars of Pietri’s work agree that “Pietri’s political and poetic vision evolved more or less in unison” (Noel, In/Visible 18). However, though scholars have read Puerto Rican

Obituary within the generative intersection of Pietri’s work with the Young Lords Party and the Puerto Rican Socialist Party, his work has not been read alongside his contemporaneous involvement with the radical pedagogy of the Teachers and Writers

Collaborative (TWC), as I do here.

the Puerto Rican debt crisis” (Bonilla et al.) and Lin-Manuel Miranda’s hurricane relief song, “Almost Like Praying” (Atlantic Records).

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In 1965 and 1966, nearly ten years prior to the publication of Nuyorican Poetry:

An Anthology of Words and Feelings (1975), Tufts University financed a series of conferences for writers and educators on experimental writing instruction and the role of writers in the classroom. The conference launched what would become the Teachers and

Writers Collaborative, an organization that matched living writers with public school classrooms and ran writing pedagogy workshops. Pedro Pietri was one of the founding writers involved in the TWC (Lopate 7).131 In one of the TWC’s first newsletters, the director of the workshops poses the driving question of the group’s work: “Since children are systematically taught not to think in school, and every subsequent group experience from religious instruction to basic training reinforces this awful crippling of the brain, how then can we help children in a classroom to say and write what they really think— essentially a dangerous, non-conformist activity?” (PP 71, 5).132 Still active decades later, the TWC has worked with tens of thousands of teachers and students in New York City schools, and published over eighty books about teaching writing (“About us”).

While Pietri was cultivating the linguistically innovative and multi-modal poetics of Puerto Rican Obituary within the larger Nuyorican poetry movement, he was engaged with the praxis of intellectual liberation on the ground with students of color and from

131 Other writers involved with the TWC during its founding decade include Anne Sexton, David Henderson, June Jordan, Grace Paley, and Victor Hernández Cruz. Cruz’s first published collection of poetry, Snaps (1968), also suggests some compelling intersections between how he poetically examines education and the public work he did with Herbert Kohl, one of the founders of the TWC. However, in order to closely examine the intersections of banking pedagogy and indebtedness in the context of human rights literature, I focus this chapter solely on Pietri and his heretofore-unexamined work with the TWC. Cruz’s work represents a rich avenue for a future expansion of the ideas in this chapter. 132 The archival material referenced in this article, including this newsletter, is from Pietri’s unpublished letters and papers in the archives of Hunter College’s Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños. My references to these materials are listed as “PP” for Pietri Papers, followed by the box numbers and folder numbers used in the archives. Thus, “PP 71, 5” indicates “Pietri Papers, Box 71, Folder 5.”

182 low-income backgrounds through the TWC.133 This contemporaneity invites us to read his poetry alongside the correspondence and TWC material that he saved. In doing so, I propose that Pietri’s poetic articulation of, and resistance to, indebtedness can be read beyond the page and into communal spaces of learning; in other words, the poetic resistance cultivated within Puerto Rican Obituary can be extended into the praxis of its afterlives in classrooms. In what follows, I first compare the discourse of Puerto Rican self-determination, as expressed by the Young Lords during the Long Sixties, with the

United Nations’ contemporaneous deployment of “self-determination” in its human rights documents. By doing so, I connect the Puerto Rican self-determination movement, and its associated Nuyorican writers, to the “Third World”-aligned student movements I have already discussed in this dissertation, and further, to those movements’ interventions into the instrumentalization enabled by liberal, Enlightenment-based discourses of human rights. After this discussion, I turn my attention to how Pietri articulates indebtedness as a cultural pedagogy in poems from Puerto Rican Obituary that expand upon “Tata,” including the title poem, “Puerto Rican Obituary,” and the poems “The Last Game in the

World Series” and “Broken English Dream.” My final section examines how Pietri

133 The term “Nuyorican” indicates the culture, language, and experience of the New York Puerto Rican (Nuyorican) community. It was adopted by the writers Miguel Algarín and Miguel Piñero during a trip to Puerto Rico in which they heard it used toward them derisively and was anthologized in 1975 with their publication of Nuyorican Poetry: An Anthology of Puerto Rican Words and Feelings. Since the term was coined, it has been used by writers to indicate their solidarity with or distinction from the movement known for poetic and linguistic innovation, by scholars and anthologists to group writers together, and especially today, a cultural grouping of those growing up in New York City’s East Harlem with Puerto Rican roots. Poets, writers, and performers affiliated with the Nuyorican movement in the ’70s were at the forefront of anti-establishment, performative, communal, testimonial, and poetic practices. The Poets Café on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, which was founded by Algarín and Piñero as a home for poetic experimentation and communal practice in the ’70s, continues to be an active, nurturing space and a hub for the art of slam poetry today. During these critical decades, the Nuyoricans and their practice were interpolated with educational institutions as both insiders and outsiders, as well as professors, lecturers, students, program designers, and community activists. They were also involved in initiatives like the TWC that directly crossed classroom spaces with literary ones. In other words, the exploration of what it means to do, prove, perform, and express learning has always been cultivated within their work.

183 disrupts that pedagogy of indebtedness through praxis, as his poetics take new formations in the TWC’s dialogical spaces of teaching and learning. As scholars work to cultivate new understandings of resilience within Puerto Rican indebtedness, and more broadly, within racial and neocolonial capitalism as a global structure of violence, reading Pietri’s work through this pedagogical relation helps us identify ways that artistic, embodied knowledge takes formation—as poetry, as a drawing, as a letter, as dialogue, as a learning process. Pietri’s poetic praxis becomes a site of persistent resistance to the technologies of racial capitalism, and thus a mode of resilience that cannot be accessed or co-opted by the liberal rhetoric of educability that indebts Puerto Ricans to human rights.

BETWEEN PUERTO RICAN “SELF-DETERMINATION” AND HUMAN RIGHTS

The Long Sixties was an explosive era for anti-colonialism, nationalist, counter- cultural and global student movements. As I have discussed in the earlier chapters of this dissertation, student movements in Latin America (particularly Argentina) were aligned with the “Third World” movements occurring both globally and within the United States.

These included the Black Civil Rights movement and the self-determination movements of Chicanos and Puerto Ricans.134 Within popular memory of national movements of the

Long Sixties in the United States, however, these movements tend to be overlooked in favor of the “Free Speech” and anti-Vietnam war protests on college campuses,135 even as men of color constituted a significant proportion of the enlisted, wounded, and

134 See Valeria Manzano (Age of Youth 2014; “Tercer mundo” 2014) and Richard Walter (1968). 135 Coincidentally, Pietri had a job at the Columbia University library while student activism there grew increasingly militant. He indicates that it was in reading everything he could get his hands that he realized that “brown and black people wrote” (Hernández 110-111). Pietri worked there until he was drafted and sent to the front lines of the disastrous Tet Offensive early in 1968.

184 killed.136 In scholarship examining a global context of human rights and youth activism in the Long Sixties, the “Free Speech” movement, followed by the Black Civil Rights movement, tends to be cited far more often than the “Chicano-Rican” movement.137 In one of the few broadly comparative studies of global student activism, Phillip Altbach’s

1989 article makes a clear, though dated, distinction that aids in considering how the

“Chicano-Rican” movement operated on the register of the “Third World politics” of

Argentina and Mexico. Altbach writes that in the Third World, “[s]tudents have, in many cases, been involved in independence movements and from the beginning of the state have been a recognised part of the political system. Thus, in contrast to the West, where activism is seen by most people to be an aberration and an illegitimate intrusion into politics, Third World students are expected to participate directly in politics and activism is seen as a legitimate part of the political system” (107). In an era when students within the United States were adopting the moniker of “Third World” to signify ethnic-based independence and self-determination,138 we should understand the Puerto Rican self- determination movement as engaging within the same decolonial human rights frameworks as those of other “Third World” nations.

136 Historian Gerald Goodwin explains that “African-Americans represented approximately 11 percent of the civilian population. Yet in 1967, they represented 16.3 percent of all draftees and 23% of all combat troops in Vietnam. In 1965, African-Americans accounted for nearly 25 percent of all combat deaths in Vietnam” (“Black and White in Vietnam”). The data on the number of Puerto Ricans who participated in Vietnam is less clear, since it only accounts for those who were drafted or enlisted in Puerto Rico (“Vietnam War”). Beyond the Department of Defense estimates that 48,000 Puerto Ricans participated in the conflict, the Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños estimates that an additional 12,000 stateside Puerto Ricans served in Vietnam (“Vietnam War”). 137 See, for example, James Jasper (2014, 1997), Kenneth H. Tucker Jr. (2010), Michael T. Kaufman (2009), and Mark Kurlansky (2004) 138 I refer to the Third World Liberation Front strikes beginning in 1968, most notably at San Francisco State University and the University of California, Berkeley.

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However, within the United States, the language of “civil rights” for these Third

World movements tends to supersede any recognition of these movements as a demand for “human rights.” The designation of “civil rights” crucially (and accurately) reflects the urgency of local and domestic political change. Human rights discourse, on the other hand, is purposefully positioned as a supra-national construct. Thus, while the language of “civil rights” enables political action and highlights structural violence, it also contains that violence to the purview of the nation-state.139 In the cases of Argentina and Mexico, scholars and activists deploy the framework of human rights in order to indicate that structural and personal violence140 is present both within and beyond the sovereignty of the government. It is important to recognize the social and political action affiliated with the “civil rights” movement as part of a global context of human rights discourse and action. Writers affiliated with the Nuyorican movement engaged in political action with a number of groups: locally with the Young Lords for Puerto Rican immigrant rights, nationally with the Black Arts movement, the Brown Berets, and M.E.Ch.A (Movimiento

Estudiantil Chicanx de Aztlán [Chicanx Student Movement of Aztlán]) /,141 and globally with student democratic manifestations and anti-colonial independence movements (for

139 Since the founding of the United Nations, the United States has distanced itself from the language of human rights within international conventions, agreements, and laws. As of the writing of this dissertation, the United States has refused to sign and/or ratify 44 international treaties, including the Convention on the Rights of the Child, the Convention against Enforced Disappearance, and the Option Protocol to the Convention against Torture (“United States Ratification of Human Rights Treaties”). 140 I borrow these terms from Johan Galtung, the founder of the academic discipline of peace and conflict studies. After establishing a definition of peace as “the absence of violence,” Galtung asserts that violence is present when “human beings are being influenced so that their actual somatic and mental realizations are below their potential realizations” (“Violence” 167-168). Personal violence is present when there is a direct and clear subject who enacts violence; if structural violence is present, there is no specified actor (170). Galtung emphasizes that structural violence—which, he notes, may also be called social injustice—is “built into the structure and shows up as unequal power and consequently as unequal life chances” (171). 141 There were are distinctions between these movements in the relationship between their poesis and their politics; Nuyorican poetry was anti-programmatic, while Chicano movement poetry was made in close relation to El Plan de Atzlán (See see Michael Dowdy, 2010).

186 their island and elsewhere).142 Though different in kind, these groups and movements all adopted the language of self-determination in order to protect minoritized identities and work toward their shared goals of liberation from cultural and economic oppression.

However, their deployment of the term was distinct from the self-determination foundational to the human rights documents of the United Nations. This distinction can be understood, I argue, as a non-alignment with the implicit educability of liberal self- determination captured in the colonial language of the Universal Declaration of Human

Rights.

The first three points in the Young Lords Party’s 13 Point Program and Platform, a manifesto for the group’s political and community-organizing work, demonstrate this distinction. These first points reflect the way in which self-determination is rhetorically placed in a foundational position for the declarations made in the remainder of the manifesto:143

1. We want self-determination for Puerto Ricans--Liberation of the Island and

inside the United States.

For 500 years, first spain and then united states have colonized our country.

Billions of dollars in profits leave our country for the united states every year. In

142 Marisol Moreno (2012) and Ramón Soto Crespo (2009) have written about the ways that Nuyoricans were involved in these various intersections between mainland and island politics. Arlene Dávila (2001; 2004) and Juan Flores (2001) have written extensively on the ways in which the Nuyoricans and the Barrio itself were central to the burgeoning development of Latinxs as a cultural and geopolitical group within the United States. 143 Modeled on the Black Panther Party, the Young Lords were also anti-Vietnam war and pro-Third World Liberation.

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every way we are slaves of the gringo. We want liberation and the Power in the

hands of the People, not Puerto Rican exploiters.

Que Viva Puerto Rico Libre!

2. We want self-determination for all Latinos.

Our Latin Brothers and Sisters, inside and outside the united states, are oppressed

by amerikkkan business. The Chicano people built the Southwest, and we support

their right to control their lives and their land. The people of Santo Domingo

continue to fight against gringo domination and its puppet generals. The armed

liberation struggles in Latin America are part of the war of Latinos against

imperialism.

Que Viva La Raza!

3. We want liberation of all third world people.

Just as Latins first slaved under spain and the yanquis, Black people, Indians, and

Asians slaved to build the wealth of this country. For 400 years they have fought

for freedom and dignity against racist Babylon (decadent empire). Third World

people have led the fight for freedom. All the colored and oppressed peoples of

the world are one nation under oppression. (Young Lords: A Reader 11-12, my

emphasis)

In this document, the deployment of the term “self-determination” provides the foundation for the rhetorical, social, and historical linkage between the local sphere of the

Puerto Ricans’ humanity to that of oppressed peoples globally. That oppression is

188 articulated as part of a hemispheric history that links fifteenth-century colonialism to U.S. neocolonialism and imperialism and to racial capitalism, but there is no specific mention of “human rights.”

At the same time that the 13 Point Program and Platform was being used to rally a nation of Puerto Ricans whose humanity had been overlooked by civil and international law, the United Nations drafted a document that also deployed the term “self- determination.” In 1966, the body ratified its next major human rights document after the

1948 Universal Declaration. Comprising this document were the International Covenants on Civil and Political Rights and on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights.144 Both covenants begin in exactly the same way: a preamble is followed by the rights of all peoples to self-determination, which then provides for further protections on religion, speech, education, and other social and economic institutions:

Recognizing that these rights derive from the inherent dignity of the human

person,

Recognizing that, in accordance with the Universal Declaration of Human

Rights, the ideal of free human beings enjoying civil and political freedom and

144 The creation of two distinct documents for these rights occurred in the context of the Cold War. The United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights explains: “In the past, there has been a tendency to speak of economic, social and cultural rights as if they were fundamentally different from civil and political rights. While the Universal Declaration of Human Rights made no distinction between rights, the distinction appeared in the context of the deepening Cold War tensions between East and West. The market economies of the West tended to put greater emphasis on civil and political rights, while the centrally planned economies of the Eastern bloc highlighted the importance of economic, social and cultural rights. This led to the negotiation and adoption of two separate Covenants—one on civil and political rights, and another on economic, social and cultural rights. However, this strict separation has since been abandoned and there has been a return to the original architecture of the Universal Declaration. In recent decades, human rights treaties such as the Convention on the Rights of the Child or the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities have integrated all rights” (“Key concepts on ESCRs”).

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freedom from fear and want can only be achieved if conditions are created

whereby everyone may enjoy his civil and political rights, as well as his

economic, social and cultural rights…

PART I

Article 1

1. All peoples have the right of self-determination. By virtue of that right they

freely determine their political status and freely pursue their economic, social, and

cultural development. (“International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights”;

“International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights”)

The language of these preambles parallels that evoked by Young Lords; both make “self- determination” foundational to liberation, or “freedom.” However, only the U.N. documents deploy these terms as the conditions of “human rights.” I would argue that the absence of the term “human rights” in the Young Lords document speaks to the role of the liberal, Enlightenment-era concept of self-determination at the root of these U.N. documents. As I discussed in my introduction, the recognition of the “human” in that context was tied to a “civilizing” imperative that shepherded the atrocities named in the

13 Point Program. Furthermore, “human rights” in the U.N. context deploys an incorporative logic that Puerto Rico itself troubles.

Puerto Rico can be seen as a limit case for the U.N.’s logic of incorporation. The legal title of Puerto Rico situates it as marginal yet within state structures, as a perpetual

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“unincorporated territory of the United States with Commonwealth status.”145 Marisol

Moreno has discussed the ways in which Puerto Rico inhabits the ambiguity of its position in both the First World and the Third World (7). That position can be made further ambiguous by a broad application of a hegemonic, homogenizing notion of latinidad as a cultural identifier. As Frances Aparicio and Marta Caminero-Santangelo have discussed, the broad application of latinidad can erase the complexities of distinct

Latinx identities and experiences; in this case, the distinct experiences of Puerto Ricans on the mainland from those living on the island.146 Nuyorican latinidad is thus doubly colored with “un-incorporation” between the legal status of Puerto Rico and the cultural un-incorporation of mainland Latinxs as fully recognized and protected persons within the United States. Though Puerto Rican and Nuyorican writing of this era would, in the following two decades, become anthologized as part of a broader Latinx canon seen as asserting literary spaces for marginalized voices, its unincorporated character would remain a critical source of debate and discussion. Juan Flores has asserted the importance of this distinctive Puerto Rican position with respect to other “hyphenated” experiences of latinidad.147 Flores argues, “Puerto Ricans typically challenge that marker of collusion or compatibility and erase it as inappropriate to their social position and identity” (196).

145 The attitudes and policies growing out of this incorporated status have shifted across the decades. During the time of the writing of the U.N. covenants, there was a strong movement for Puerto Rican independence. At the time of the writing of this dissertation, the most recent referendum in Puerto Rico was in 2012 and suggested the majority of voters favored full statehood (61%), with free association following (33%), and only 5% in favor of full independence (Garrett). The debt-rescue plan passed in Congress in July 2016 suggested a relationship with Puerto Rico indicative of the responsibilities of any other incorporated state, but it was criticized for casting a continuing neocolonial relationship (and thus maintaining an unincorporated state practice) with an oversight body devoid of Puerto Ricans (“Puerto Rico Control Board”). 146 See Aparicio and Chávez-Silverman (1997) and Caminero-Santangelo (2007). 147 This assertion was made in response to the arguments in Gustavo Perez-Firmat’s 1994 book Life on the Hyphen: the Cuban-American Way and Ilan Stavans’ 1995 book The Hispanic Condition: Reflections on Culture and Identity in America, particularly the first chapter, “Life in the Hyphen.”

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The resistance characterized by Flores here is not simply resistance to the principle of incorporation, but also to the narrative of already-having-been-incorporated; as an ongoing colony, Puerto Rico has only ever been tare to the incorporation of its colonizers. Thus, the issue of Puerto Rican “incorporation” doubles down on the tautological logic of an exclusionary, deficit-based educability at the heart of the U.N. covenants.

The case of Puerto Rico, and further, of Pietri’s poetic engagement with this history, makes the cultural/metaphorical pedagogy of deficit viscerally tangible. The

Nuyorican poets were at the crossroads of the Young Lords, the Black Arts Movement, the Atzlán movement and the Puerto Rican Independence Movement, as well as the global reform movements spurred on and sustained by students. In many ways, the

Nuyorican Poets were emblematic of the innovative linkages between literary creation, social consciousness, and civil activism of this era. Nuyorican writers called for a notion of communal determination that countered the U.N.’s logic of “self-determination,” even while appropriating the authority of nationalism imbued in that logic. We can see this explicitly in Miguel Algarín and Miguel Piñero’s introduction to Nuyorican Poetry: An

Anthology of Puerto Rican Words and Feelings. They assert that “[a] clique (a New York street clique) is a group of people who offer each other safety. Safety in numbers is nationalism. Nationalism is mutual protection . . . a city clique needs to have a geographical identity [through anthems, colors, flags] as inviolable as that of any nation formally recognized by the UN." (Algarín and Piñero 14; my emphasis). Thus, the claim to educability through communal selfhood is inextricable from the establishment of a sovereign space in which the capacity for liberatory, self-determinative thought is

192 possible. The Nuyorican poets saw poetry as a praxis that created such a space. One poet- activist educator, Louis Reyes Rivera, evinces Nuyorican literary praxis as a whole when he articulated this in terms of a mandate for learning. He writes:

On the one side, there are millions on top of millions of pages no longer available;

hidden in vaults, collecting dust on a Vatican shelf; scrolls as ancient as our sweat

listed in the Index of Prohibited Books, kept from the purview of the people until

such time as the facts contained therein no longer threaten the controls over

people’s minds. We become slaves to the images fed. We remain slaves from the

information withheld. The path to our liberation can only be realized when

knowing it all… (Reyes Rivera xiii-xiv).

Reyes connects the banking educational practices of occlusion and selective dissemination of knowledge to the moment of colonial encounter with the Americas. The liberation Reyes Rivera seeks is found through “knowing it all,” which requires resisting and rewriting the pedagogies that acculturate Puerto Ricans as passive, enslaved bodies.

Urayoán Noel characterizes this Nuyorican poetic practice as “mattering” bodies; he argues that “theirs are performative identities in the sense famously theorized by Judith

Butler, inseparable from sited poetic and political gestures” (“Bodies” 855). My reading of indebtedness in Pietri’s poetic praxis demonstrates that what Noel identifies as the poetic “mattering” of bodies is inseparable from the poetic embodiment of learning.

A CULTURAL PEDAGOGY OF INDEBTEDNESS

The title poem of Puerto Rican Obituary speaks broadly to the racialized subjection of people under capitalism and the intersectional ethnic movements pressing

193 back against hegemonic ideas of “American” in the United States during the Long

Sixties. The “obituary” records how indebtedness consumes the full subjectivities of five

Puerto Ricans as they pursue a promised “American Dream.”148 The poem’s affective representation of physical and mental indebtedness is a critical element of what Raphael

Dalleo and Elena Machado Sáez identify as its didactic, anticolonial project (17). An insistent rhythm of daily death is punctuated by a reversal of the “lazy” stereotype of

Puerto Ricans as beneficiaries of a welfare state (Soto Crespo 120):

They worked

They were always on time

They were never late

They never spoke back

when they were insulted

They worked

They never took days off

that were not on the calendar

They never went on strike

without permission

They worked

ten days a week

148 Pietri has also suggested that the “obituary” of Puerto Rican Obituary is in reference to the trauma of his experience during the Vietnam War. Specifically, he wrote one of the poems in the collection for a Puerto Rican he met in the army. The young man had asserted that it was “not our war,” yet was sent and killed within a month of arriving in Vietnam (Hernández 111). Pietri describes the war as the moment when his “political education flourished. . . . There were a lot of Puerto Ricans in Vietnam, a lot of minorities. We were the grunts; they sacrificed us, and then the cadets would come later on to take credit for whatever was done” (112). His comments, and their suggestiveness as the impetus for his poetry, reflect his awareness of how Puerto Rican bodies were tared under the causes of white supremacy and neoimperialism.

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and were only paid for five

They worked

They worked

They worked

and they died

They died broke

They died owing

They died never knowing

what the front entrance

of the first national city bank looks like

The opening of the poem holds tightly to its rhythm; the repeated sets of words and actions cultivate an affect of inevitability and monotony.149 The audience is marched through the poem’s stanzas in this manner, anchored by the choral invocation of the unyielding labor and cyclical death of Puerto Ricans:

Juan

Miguel

Milagros

Olga

Manuel

All died yesterday today

and will die again tomorrow

149 I highly recommend watching the recording of Pietri’s recitation of the poem at the 111th St. Methodist Church in order to see how he performatively embodies this affect. One version of the performance can be found on Vimeo at https://vimeo.com/154802392.

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passing their bill collectors

on to the next of kin (Puerto Rican Obituary 1-2)

The refrain invoking the silent Juan, Miguel, Milagros, Olga, and Manuel has a dirge-like quality. It emphasizes the multiple layers of temporality circumscribed by this obituary, from the daily to the generational. This recursive, inter-generational death, and inter- generational debt, also suggest an evocation of the “living dead” found in the practices and legacies of santería in Puerto Rico and its diaspora, whose roots are in the Yoruba religions of West Africa. The extended family of the living dead “consists not only of the living members but also the departed ones” (Lawal 59). The dead are never dead, but will return as ancestral spirits or as future generations.150 When read through santería, the dirge-like chorus of the poem tells us that Pietri’s obituary is not only for those represented by Juan, Miguel, Milagros, Olga, and Manuel, but for their accompanying generations of living dead. The poem suggests that the only sustained, ongoing longevity within the Nuyorican experience is that of indebtedness to this never-realized promise of the “American Dream.” A legacy of indebtedness, rather than the protection of family spirits, is passed from generation to generation. The “American Dream” spreads like a virus through television and other forms of cultural escapism, while it oils the mechanisms that maintain labor for the benefit of the already-empowered:

But they understand

Their parents understood

Is a long non-profit ride

150 For a history of how santería migrated and developed from West Africa through the Americas, see Joseph M. Murphy’s Santería: African Spirits in America (3rd edition, 2011).

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from Spanish Harlem

to long island cemetery.

[…]

If only they

had turned off the television

and tune into their own imaginations

[…]

If only they

had kept their eyes open (Puerto Rican Obituary 3,10)

Pietri’s critique of cultural consumption is rooted in the way the cult of the “American

Dream,” perpetuated by popular media, trains the Puerto Rican intellect. “Puerto Rican

Obituary” foregrounds the ways in which Puerto Ricans are the students of a market pedagogy that enslaves them to the capital-driven state, and it mourns not only the loss of their bodies but their imaginative capacities outside of a liberal market framework.

However, even while the poem maps that mourning process, Pietri still insists on the persistent, generative possibilities of their imaginations by shifting the passive, past-tense phrasing of “had turned off” to the present tense of “tune in.”

Paulo Freire’s pedagogical theories help illustrate how Pietri is drawing a connection between learning and cultural and economic indebtedness in “Puerto Rican

Obituary.” Freire developed the initial principles of what would become critical pedagogy while in exile from Brazil’s dictatorship. He published Pedagogia do oprimido

(Pedagogy of the Oppressed) in 1968, overlapping with the era of the Young Lords, the burgeoning of the Nuyorican Poetry Movement, and the inception of the Teachers and

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Writers Collaborative. His theory of “banking pedagogy” describes the learning framework through which a debt-based education operates. In a banking classroom, teachers authoritatively deposit knowledge into passive students as if they were empty vessels (Freire 79). Under this metric, “learning” has occurred when students have demonstrated their successful passive consumption of that knowledge, with the effect, as

Freire says, of the “lifelessness and petrification” that characterizes the tone of “Puerto

Rican Obituary” (Freire 71). In “Puerto Rican Obituary,” Pietri links the banking pedagogy of the classroom with that of broader public economic and cultural structures.

Freire’s work shows us that when students are seen as inherently lacking knowledge within a space of learning, the supposed educational “investment” made in the future is predicated on an inescapable cycle of indebtedness to a strict hierarchy of power. Within the framework of a consumer capitalist state, the same designation of lack also becomes a means to account for liberal, state-incorporated subjects with “indebted” status, such as the abuela, Juan, Miguel, Milagros, Olga, and Manuel. Through a designation of lack, the state is able to account for the presence of marginalized citizens in society, while still reinforcing the racialized rubric that depends upon and maintains their marginal status. We see this structure coded pedagogically in later stanzas of

“Puerto Rican Obituary:”

They are dead

They are dead

and will not return from the dead

until they stop neglecting

the art of their dialogue

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for broken english lessons

to impress the mister goldsteins

who keep them employed

as lavaplatos porters messenger boys

factory workers maids stock clerks

shipping clerks assistant mailroom

assistant, assistant assistant

to the assistant’s assistant

assistant lavaplatos and automatic

artificial smiling doormen

for the lowest wages of the ages

and rages when you demand a raise

because is against the company policy

to promote SPICS SPICS SPICS (Puerto Rican Obituary 8)

These lines stage the economic and cultural banking relation between pedagogy and indebtedness. Pietri sees Puerto Ricans abandoning their own language and intellect in order to adopt the marginalized role forced upon them in racialized, U.S. capitalist society. The “broken english lessons” signify an education that leads to lack, rather than opportunity and abundance. The poem reveals this lack as a kind of structural violence, one compounded by the personal violence of the slur “spics,” explosively popping out to the reader in capital letters like a slap in the face. Pietri emphasizes the re-iterative nature of this violence through the Jewish employers—the “mr. goldsteins” who are unable to learn from their own experiences with cultural and racial exploitation. Johan Galtung’s

199 definition of structural violence, as opposed to personal violence, evinces its principal quality as absence—as lack, explaining that “structural violence is silent, it does not show—it is essentially static, it is the tranquil waters. In a static society, personal violence will be registered, whereas structural violence may be seen as about as natural as the air around us” (Galtung 173). When we recognize that culture is a medium of that naturalization, the urgent stakes of Pietri’s and the Nuyoricans’ formation of poetry not only as artistic representation but as tangible praxis against economic structural violence reveal themselves.

Pietri elaborates on the violence of a cultural banking pedagogy in “The Last

Game of the World Series.” Though the poem documents the structural and personal violence present in particular impoverished communities like East Harlem, it also reflects broader contemporaneous conversations in the U.S. about the effects of popular mass media on the minds of its indebted viewers. Stanley Aronowitz’s writing, for example, which laments the eclipse of reason by popular culture among youth, reveals a predominant attitude toward students that characterizes them as passive victims of these mass pedagogies while blaming them for being the foremost enablers of those pedagogies.151 Jesus Martín Barbero’s work helps us consider how Puerto Rican

Obituary connects popular media consumption to welfare programs as mediations of a pedagogy of indebtedness.

151 In 1977, Stanley Aronowitz wrote, “Television, film, and photography, far from making culture democratic, have fostered the wide dissemination of industrialized entertainment so that the capacity of persons to produce their own culture in the widest meaning of the term has become restricted. . . . I mean the capacity of persons to make inferences, to offer arguments, to develop explanations of social events that may counter those that are considered authoritative” (Aronowitz 771).

200

Martín-Barbero discusses the link between the modern establishment of a category of lo culto—that which is cultured, or educated—and of lo popular as the populous. Tracing this link back to a fundamental ambiguity in political theories of the

Enlightenment, he argues that the state’s invocation of “the people” is a means of marginalizing the populous from culture, and thus from power. For Martín-Barbero, lo popular relies upon the exclusion of lo culto. He writes that

la invocación al pueblo legitima el poder de la burguesía en la medida exacta en

que esa invocación articula su exclusión de la cultura. Y es en ese movimiento

que se gestan las categorías de ‘lo culto’ y ‘lo popular’. Esto es, de lo popular

como in-culto, de lo popular designando, en el momento de su constitución en

concepto, un modo específico de relación con la totalidad de lo social: la de la

negación, la de una identidad refleja, la de aquello que está constituido no por lo

que es sino por lo que falta. (Martín-Barbero 15-16; my emphasis)

this invocation of the people legitimizes the power of the bourgeoisie to the

precise extent that the invocation articulates their exclusion from culture. And it is

in this move that the categories of ‘cultured’ (as in educated or “highbrow”) and

‘popular’ are developed. This is—from the designation of ‘the popular’ as ‘un-

cultured’ at the moment of the formation of the concept—a specific mode of

relating with the totality of the social: that of negation, that of a reflexive identity,

that which is constituted not by what is but by what is lacked.

“The Last Game of the World Series” affectively stages being rendered inculto. It performs an echo of popular television tropes, radio waves, and other kinds of

201 mechanized sounds and announcements. The poem opens with an announcement blends the migration of Puerto Ricans with their consumption of popular media: “WE

INTERRUPT THIS PROGRAM; WELCOME ABOARD.” The soundbites that follow this announcement circulate, shape, numb, or animate the bodies of East Harlem Puerto

Ricans, marking them inculto:

…yes those oldies

but goodies remind me of the last time

you o/d on the roof & fell off into

sewers of broken wine bottles

yr eyes rolled onto the streets

& were run over by garbage truck

from the sanitation department

with the american flag on the muffler

& the red white & blue crew on the truck

going beyond oldies but goodies

M-I-C-K-E-Y M-O-U-S-E-Eeeeeeeeeeeeee

remember how the traffic cop laughed

when he saw you dead on the street

he laughed so hard that his false teeth

& contact lenses & hairpiece fell off

& he had to go on emergency leave

singing eee ayyy eee ayy ooooooooh

you was taken to the city morgue

202

in the trunk of the police squad car

with an OINK OINK here OINK OINK there

here an OINK there an OINK everywhere

an OINK eee ayyy eee ayyy ooooooooh… (Puerto Rican Obituary 87-88)

The “oldie but goodie” phraseology of a radio disc jockey, the splattered iconography of working-class patriotism, the refrain from the network TV show The Mickey Mouse Club, and the “Old MacDonald” nursery rhyme envelop the violence of life under racial capitalism. Mickey Mouse and Old MacDonald’s presence suggest that part of the way in which that violence is structured is through policies that infantilize the neighborhood’s residents. Pietri blends the figures of the policemen with pigs; this was an almost ubiquitous depiction of the police during this era, but Pietri amplifies it by casting the figure of the body in the police car as the domesticated societal animal of labor in the

MacDonald’s farm, or more likely, the fast-food chain McDonald’s “farm.” Pietri’s sharp critique of popular culture consumption is linked to a critique of the colonial pedagogies driving the politics and economics of life in urban communities.

Puerto Ricans and other racially-minoritized groups of the late 60s lived through this mode of pedagogical incorporation during Lyndon Johnson’s “War on Poverty.” This set of economic policies and educational initiatives drove urban development during the civil rights era. While these policies were intended to address the needs of poor and racially-minoritized communities, and did support the broad expansion of higher educational opportunities, they operated through an underlying logic of liberal

203

“bootstrap” market values that would coalesce into modern neoliberalism.152 Students were the primary targets of Johnson’s strategies in his “War on Poverty,” which included the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964 that aimed to give underprivileged Americans the opportunity to "develop skills, continue education, and find useful work" (Johnson 182).

This particular emphasis on usefulness as the goal of public education was inspired by

Michael Harrington’s 1962 work The Other America: Poverty in the United States, which was highly circulated among the policy-makers of the Kennedy Administration.

Johnson’s policies piggyback on Harrington’s characterizations of impoverished communities as having a particular psychology naturalized to them. Though well- meaning as a galvanizing exposé, the work promoted a naturalized “otherness” to those who lacked education and rendered the poor as incapable of being their own agents of change. Harrington writes, "The individual cannot usually break out of this vicious circle.

Neither can the group, for it lacks the social energy and political strength to turn its misery into a cause. Only the larger society, with its help and resources, can really make it possible for these people to help themselves..." (Harrington 15). As one critic wrote at the time of the policy’s implementation, “by concentrating on 'education, training, and character building,' government assumes 'that the poor themselves have something wrong with them.' Thus the introduction of a program aimed at the radical goal of eliminating poverty, ultimately sustains the very system and ideology responsible for that poverty"

(Jencks 179). In essence, these policies both coded Nuyoricans inculto—impoverished, irrespective of their actual economic or educational footing—and addressed that poverty

152 Arlene Dávila conducted an extensive study on the way in which the War on Poverty policies initiated a continuous struggle over the use or exchange value of space in the Barrio neighborhood of New York City (2004).

204 through a measurement that placed them in a position of lack. As a social pedagogy of indebtedness, this policy promised a pathway to full personhood only upon acceptance that its students, by default, lacked it.

This social pedagogy—and economy—of indebtedness would also have manifested locally for Pietri. During the era of the Young Lords and Pietri’s writing, the longstanding issues driving the “War on Poverty” policies had crystalized into a crisis in

New York City’s public schools. Neighborhoods like East Harlem, whose black and

Latinx populations were increasing exponentially, featured schools with poor instruction that fueled high illiteracy rates and instances of violence.153 In the same year as the publication of Puerto Rican Obituary (1973), Diane Ravitch published a history of New

York City public schools that locates her contemporary moment of crisis in the longer history of the institution. She observes that in 1967, 90% of the city’s teachers were white, though the black and Puerto Rican student populations were anticipated to rise to

70% by 1980 (319). Referring to outcomes by the late 1960s, Ravitch writes,

Community-action programs became for poor blacks and Puerto Ricans what

Tammany Hall once had been for poor Irish and Italians. Tammany Hall acted on

behalf of the immigrant to help him where the government would not; the local

poverty program acted on behalf of the poor black and Puerto Rican, in place of a

government which had become too remote to reach him and too bureaucratized to

care about him. (288)

Ravitch is describing the action of groups like the Young Lords and the Black Panthers, who organized local community aid programs. East Harlem, the locus of community for

153 See Diane Ravitch, The Great School Wars: A History of the New York City Public Schools.

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Puerto Ricans in New York, became a flashpoint for what Ravitch calls “The Great

School Wars.”

Pietri’s poem, “The Broken English Dream,” stages a mistrust of the government- sponsored programs and institutional structures that perpetuated the violence of indebtedness on the Puerto Rican community.154 The poem documents their effects through a blend of lyric forms and linguistic styles of expression, interrogating the relations between aesthetic form, intellectual form, and structures of learning. These effects are revealed in three valences of the poem’s title that emerge throughout the poem. In the initial stanzas, the stark reality depicted invites us to read the title with the word “broken” as a modifier of the word “English,” highlighting the phrase “broken

English” as a racist term for the English learned and spoken by Puerto Ricans on the mainland. The “dream”—or nightmare—is the life lived by communities marked with this colonial legacy:

It was the night

before the welfare check

and everybody sat around the table

hungry heartbroken cold confused

and unable to heal the wounds

on the dead calendar of our eyes

154 In an interview with Carmen Hernández, Pietri reflected on how his teachers would punish any Spanish spoken in their classrooms, echoing a story told by other Nuyorican authors Hernández interviewed for her book. He tells Hernández (with his consummate dark humor), “Well, there was this English teacher, she was really an idiot. She was a special education case. And she always used to tell us, ‘If you speak Spanish, we’ll send you back to Puerto Rico.’ That was a mistake, because I should have spoken Spanish to get a free trip back. They told us, ‘Don’t speak Spanish,’ but they never really made us articulate in the English language. We were not educated in those schools; we came out semiliterate. Sometimes totally illiterate” (Hernández 109-110).

206

[…]

Infants not born yet played hide n seek

in the cemetery of their imagination

Blind in the mind tenants were praying

for numbers to hit so they can move out

and wake up with new birth certificates

[…]

Vote for me! said the undertaker: I am

the man with the solution to your problems (Puerto Rican Obituary 12-13)

Pietri elaborates on the themes of inter-generational death in relation to the destruction of the imaginative faculty of Puerto Ricans—that which renders them “Blind in the mind.”

In the last two lines of the stanza, Pietri inserts “undertaker” into the role of the politician or government bureaucrat. This insertion not only connects government programs and policies with the cycle of death seen in “Puerto Rican Obituary,” but it foregrounds the economics of Puerto Rican death for mainland politicians. By attributing “Vote for me!” to the undertaker, Pietri suggests that Puerto Ricans are complicit by choosing their own demise. However, he also insists that choice is an illusion within a liberal economy that structurally depends upon the death of Puerto Ricans.

That illusion becomes the second valence of “Broken English Dream,” where

“broken” modifies “English Dream,” and “English Dream” can be replaced by

“American Dream.” In this valence, the deployment of English for “American” dream emphasizes the United States as the hegemonic force within the Americas. The

“American Dream,” which is demystified as a morbid, consumer-driven culture, takes

207 shape within the poetic structure of the following stanzas as a pedagogical instrument of racial capitalism. The poem shifts to a more rigid and formulaic structure, establishing a space in which language becomes more mechanical, mirroring a strict banking pedagogy classroom in which students become “blind in the mind,” sapped of their own imaginative capacity:

To the united states we came

To learn how to misspell our name

[…]

To be trained to turn on television sets

To dream about jobs you will never get

To fill out welfare applications

To graduate from school without an education

[…]

Lapiz: Pencil

Pluma: Pen

Cocina: Kitchen

Gallina: Hen (13-14)

The use of the infinitive verb form and formulaic rhyme scheme calls forth the setting of a banking language classroom, full of students chanting, ad infinitum, the singular direction of their futures, while erasing their own cultural and linguistic history. The infinitive form of each verb is attached to an infinite, grim future of lack, directing its students only to the consumption of popular media and unobtainable employment. In case his readers had any doubt about the nature of this education, Pietri connects the passive

208 infinitive “to be” with the action of training. The stanzas are representative of an East

Harlem classroom in the late 60s and 70s, where black and Latinx children were

“considered faulty and ignorant by virtue of their race, class, or language” (Dávila 101).

These lines contrast starkly with the forms of freer expression seen in the earlier stanzas of the poem. Within this rigid training structure of the “American Dream,” Pietri depicts a mutually enabling and damaging relation between institutions of education, government aid, and mass-produced cultural consumption. These lines invert that pedagogy by documenting the stark reality of its end, rather than its shiny but false promise. But after the vocabulary lesson, the poem shifts into the third valence of the “Broken English

Dream.” Now the emphasis of “Broken English Dream” returns to “broken” as the modifier of “English,” but this time, as in the poem “Tata,” the term “broken English” is deployed subversively, as a satirical re-appropriation of that racist notion in order to demystify the “American Dream”:

Everyone who learns this

will receive a high school equivalence diploma

a lifetime supply of employment agencies

a different bill collector for every day of the week

the right to vote for the executioner of your choice

and two hamburgers for thirty-five cents in times square

[…]

So this is america

land of the free

for everybody

209

but our family

[…]

So this is america

land of the free

to watch the

adventure of superman

on tv if you know

somebody who owns a set

that works properly (15-16)

This final section blends the previous two valences forming and signifying the phrase

“Broken English Dream.” Though the lines follow a structure and rhyme scheme with some rigidity, the speaker also adopts the freer form of expression seen in the opening of the poem. These lines foreground the nuance of Pietri’s critique of indebtedness. Though scholars, including Ramón Soto-Crespo, have argued that “Puerto Rican Obituary” is an indictment of “a people who hastily attempt to escape colonialism by embracing a myth that ends up accelerating their demise,” of those who enlist in their own indebtedness, these final lines demonstrate that Pietri’s condemnation is also an acknowledgement of

Puerto Rican resilience within the structural violence of racial capitalism (121). Under

Soto-Crespo’s critique, the final stanza depicts a complicit community desperate to consume popular culture that distracts them from the systems that force them into poverty, demonstrated by the rare ownership of a working T.V. Yet out of the structures of indebtedness poetically represented in the first two sections, Pietri builds a new poetic form of learning modeled by the this final section, one that safeguards critical and

210 creative modes of thought and expression. That new poetic structure invites us to also recognize the way the lines depict a community developing solutions for resiliency within the constraints of capitalism; the person with the working television opens their doors to those without one, cultivating the possibility of disobedient, non-passive cultural learning by communally consuming and mocking the American “Superman.” With this creative re-appropriation, Pietri directs his poetics off the page and toward the construction of a liberatory, non-cooptable space in the community and the classroom.

POETIC LEARNING AGAINST BECOMING “BLIND IN THE MIND”

In 1968, the pressure of community groups like the Young Lords and the Puerto

Rican Socialist Party led newly-elected mayor John Lindsay to decentralize control of

New York’s public schools. The local control of public schools “led to the hiring of

Black and Latino teachers and administrative staff to bilingual and culturally tailored programs as well as to parent involvement and community control in school administration, which in turn led to the creation of the local school boards” (Dávila

101).155 The shift highlighted the critical relation between social welfare, linguistic and cultural representation, and spaces of learning. For East Harlem communities, the imperative of having bilingual teachers and culturally attentive practice in classrooms reflected Puerto Ricans’ long struggle for linguistic autonomy against hegemonic, colonial powers (Romero 7).156 The relation between social welfare, linguistic

155 These changes were overturned by 2002, when the Bloomberg administration dismantled local school boards and re-centralized power. That recentralization of power away from local decision-making has disturbing colonial echoes in the PROMESA bill. 156 Allison Fagan has also noted that “Puerto Rican American and Nuyorican writers have a distinctly different relationship to Spanish [from other Latina/o communities], given the long battle to assert linguistic freedom in the face of not one but two colonial languages (Spanish and English)” (Fagan 209).

211 expression, and knowledge formation was also at the heart of the poetic experimentation of the Nuyorican Poets.

The introduction to Miguel Algarín and Miguel Piñero’s 1975 Nuyorican Poetry:

An Anthology of Puerto Rican Words and Feelings is a manifesto on the opposition between Nuyorican language, which is the lived experience of intermingled English and

Spanish for Puerto Ricans living in the mainland, and that of the enforced English language of state institutions. In order to break with the legacy of colonialism,

“Nuyoricans would no longer think in colonial terms but would invent an aesthetics and identity that captured their new reality” (Soto Crespo 119). Safeguarding and cultivating

Nuyorican language was crucial to that rupture. Algarín and Piñero write that “the mixture of both languages grows. The interchange between both yields new verbal possibilities, new images to deal with the stresses of living on tar and cement” (15). The poet, as a participant-observer of urban life, is the source of this new language and the impetus of community action: “The poet blazes a path of fire for the self. He juggles with words. He lives risking each moment…He carries the tension of the streets in his mind and he knows how to execute his mind in action” (10). Algarín and Piñero thread a seamless relation between language and action, between language and the body, between poetic authorship, authority, and the resilience of the New York Puerto Rican community under the structural violence of racial-colonial capitalism.

Community action against the state is only possible if it is imaginable; and for

Algarín and Piñero, language makes such action imaginable. Dalleo and Machado Sáez have argued that Algarín and Piñero’s mandate for the poet is also implied within Pietri’s

“Puerto Rican Obituary.” They observe that “the poet is the one who understands the

212 problem, having lived among the people and listened to them, but he has also attained a level of consciousness that the people lack. Because of this high knowledge, only the poet can lead them to freedom” (Dalleo and Machado Sáez 20). They observe that this intellectual role of the street poet—lo culto of lo inculto—was mirrored in the Frankfurt

School and in the work of Herbert Marcuse during this same era (23). But we also see other articulations of this poetic leadership within the radical pedagogical theories of the era. In Pedagogy of the Oppressed, for example, Freire writes that a student transforms into a revolutionary leader by locating herself in a comparable position to that of the

Nuyoricans’ poet: “[A conviction for liberation] cannot be packaged and sold; it is reached, rather, by means of a totality of reflection and action. Only the leaders’ own involvement in reality, within an historical situation, led them to criticize this situation and to wish to change it” (Freire, Ramos trans. 67). While the Nuyorican movement was putting this idea into practice within their poetry, the Teachers and Writers Collaborative

(TWC) cultivated it through creative writing pedagogy with the young poets found in classrooms.

During that initial conference at Tufts University, the participants wrote a mission statement for the TWC. It begins by describing the five principles of writing instruction that emerged when teachers threw out scripted curricula and turned to children’s writing as a guide for what is addressed in the classroom: “It was not grammatical structure, number of words, but human content which determined the lesson. New principles emerged” (Lopate 32). These principles, which I cite here in full, are strikingly resonant with the Nuyorican artistic mandate:

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1) The grading of written work should be eliminated. A child’s writing should be

considered as an intimate revelation of his feelings and impressions, one to be

respected.

2) Teachers must learn to accept the language of children without imposing

arbitrary standards of usage that frustrate the free flow of expression. Early

emphasis on ‘correct’ usage can make the act of writing no more than an

anxious, crippling exercise for many children.

3) Children should be allowed to invent the language by which they manage

their own world. When children are encouraged to make uninhibited and

imaginative use of their own verbal experience, their sensibilities will be more

open to the power and sweep of language in the stories, myths, legends and

poems of the literary tradition.

4) No arbitrary limits should be placed on the range of experience and language

used in the classroom. If children or teachers feel that words or references or

ideas that are important to them must be censored— or are ‘out of bounds’—

then the classroom itself can become a sterile and irrelevant place.

5) Writing must not be estranged from the other arts. Acting, drawing, and

dancing can all be used in telling a story, and should be. (Lopate 32; my

emphasis)

Like Nuyorican poetics, these principles foreground the relation between language and feelings, prioritize a freedom of expression rooted in real-world experience and verbal invention based on that experience, and promote an authorial viewpoint that integrates language with other kinds of embodied performance. These principles form the poetic

214 grammar of a learning space that cultivates irreplicable authentic expression; they map a transformative pedagogy that, through aesthetic and linguistic praxis, ruptures what

Freire calls the banking pedagogical metrics and structures of colonial legacies and racial capitalism. In the following pages, I argue that the resonances between Nuyorican poetics and the manifesto of the TWC are more than coincidental. The figure of the student is critical to Pietri’s conception of the figure of the Nuyorican poet who “blazes a path of fire for the self” (Algarín and Piñero 10). This figure is crucial for Pietri’s poetic articulation of Puerto Rican indebtedness, which was forged during his commitment to the pedagogy of poetry as community action, as praxis, that resists racial capitalism. We can read the documents of this pedagogy as seamless with the pages of his poetry; together they teach us the way in which his poetics rupture a cycle of indebtedness and write Puerto Ricans out of the Obituary.

Though Pietri foregrounded the fatal effects of institutionalized banking pedagogies in his poems, the circulation of Puerto Rican Obituary within educational communities suggests that, for Pietri, new poetic imaginings could still be cultivated within traditional institutions. Puerto Rican Obituary was published as a collection in

1974, and was performed as a dramatic reading for the Educational Broadcasting

Corporation’s Realidades series that same year (PP 2,4). Pietri’s papers show that in 1973 he had already been contacted by the publisher Harcourt, who wrote to him asking permission to include “Puerto Rican Obituary” in “a literature series for grades 7-12 tentatively titled NEW WORLD ISSUES” (PP 2, 3). By 1979, it was a regularity for

Pietri to be involved in the development of poetry workshops and visitations on campuses; his letters note that he visited Queens College (PP 2,4), Medgar Evers College

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(PP 2,4), and the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee for campus workshops and readings (PP 2,6). Pietri’s commitment to these learning spaces, and students’ responsiveness to him, also suggests that he saw creative, imaginative expression as a mode of learning. Pietri’s papers include a letter from a teacher requesting copies of

“Puerto Rican Obituary” for each student who participated in Pietri’s writing workshop at his school. The teacher reveals Pietri’s ongoing commitment to this workshop when he thanks Pietri for “the wonderful work you are doing with my students,” adding, “they are, since meeting you, full of enthusiasm for poetry and writing. Looking forward to seeing you next Thursday” (PP 2, 6). Pietri’s correspondence demonstrates that sometimes the

Nuyorican poets would combine their efforts in establishing such poetic learning spaces.

In one of Pietri’s saved letters, poet José Angel Figueroa solicits Pietri’s involvement in his course at Yale University. He explains that

my students are high school drop-outs, j.s. seniors, college freshman and a few

adult community students—ALL in one class! if the sentiment is still that ‘the

stage belongs to everyone’ then I’ve arranged to get 4 writers ($75 each) with this

small sum. I gave the students a list of poets and writers: you, sandy esteves, ivan

silen and americo casiano were chosen (so was etnairis, but she’s in p.r., isn’t

she?) […] I’m using your book in the course and they love you. (PP 2,7)

Figueroa describes his motley class of usually “forgotten” students – dropouts, adult learners – and tells of the way in which Pietri’s work (poetic and pedagogical) resonates with them. All of these afterlives of Puerto Rican Obituary extend its poetics into these dialogical spaces with students, and extend the poetry into tangible, liberatory, and expressive action.

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The praxis that emerges in the afterlives of Puerto Rican Obituary, despite maintaining an underlying utopian vision of liberation from indebtedness, should not be confused with an instrumentalization of utopia. In other words, contrary to how Dalleo and Machado Saéz read the stature of the poet in “Puerto Rican Obituary,” Pietri is not the poetic “savior” of the students he encounters when he walks into a classroom; the classroom, too, requires the struggle that comes with the politics of liberation. The harsh assessment of Puerto Rican lives in the poems of Puerto Rican Obituary establishes a critical, alienating distance from the reader that is crucial to the anticolonial stance of

Pietri’s work. Dalleo and Machado Saéz observe this distance as an ambivalence in both the work of Pietri and in that of the Young Lords. They argue that with the phrase,

“‘Despierta Boricua!’ the [Young Lords] clearly expresses in its vanguardist mission by positioning itself as the agents of change separate from the pueblo. At the same time, vacillation between this distancing and the ownership implied in the formulation of ‘our people’ points to the ambivalence of the anticolonial stance” (Dalleo and Machado Saéz

21). However, that distance purposefully creates the space through which Pietri establishes praxis with his students, and through which he disrupts, rather than replicates, a banking pedagogy of cultural lack.

If the poetry in Puerto Rican Obituary, like the phrase of Young Lords, alternately gestures toward the Boricua reader to shake her shoulders or bring her in for an embrace, then that vacillation was not lost on its young readers. Among Pietri’s papers are letters he saved from a group of students at the Bronx Regional High School who had read “Puerto Rican Obituary” in class. The students’ reviews are mixed, but one constant remains: they each invite him to come to their class and discuss the poem with them. The

217 conflictual nature of the letters demonstrate that the students are responding to the ambivalent distancing of Puerto Rican Obituary. One student writes that “the poem is very kind of depressing with all those things you say about “Puerto Ricans probaly never seen the front door of a bank […] People who read it will probably take it in a wrong way. But we can understand what you was trying to say about Puerto Ricans” (PP 2,

8).157 Similarly, another student explains that

first I felt that you was comeing on to strong, However, I realized that the truth

hurts . . . Your poem describes us as helpless people which I feel is very very

wrong. You left out the good part of us. Like many of us are intelligent and are

aware of the conscequences they will pay if they “shit above their ass”!!! My

opinion about Puerto Ricans in N.Y.C are that we could do if we want, stop

listening to the white man or better put as “Anglo Saxons”. Polish up ou our act,

and get our shit together. (PP 2, 8)

While both letters recognize the poem as a call-to-action, at the same time they reflect a concern that audiences will read the poem as a textbook of stereotypes rather than as a work of art. Though the letters critique the harsh and condemnatory tone of “Puerto

Rican Obituary,” they mirror the conflict and ambivalence of Pietri’s own stance on

Puerto Rican complicity and resilience.

In perhaps the most striking letter, a third student demonstrates an awareness of a colonial legacy for people of color in the United States more broadly, while critiquing what he sees as an absence of that awareness in the poem. The student writes,

Dear Author of the poem P.R. OBit,

157 While I have highlighted only selections from their letters, I have attempted to reproduce each student writer’s syntax as accurately as possible.

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My readings of your poem makes me feel that deep down Puerto Ricans dont

really care for each other and From your opinions which you put into the poem.

You dont seem to care too. This poem describes the P.R.’s as being Under dogs

Compared to every body else.[…] My opinion about P.R.s is that theres no

difference between them or blacks in the u.s Society. 1) blacks were slaves before

now they’re Free. 2) Puerto Ricans were kind of slaves at their Country, but now

there here so that makes them Free too. The opportunity to success lies before

them if they don’t go For it or even make an attempt. Both Puerto Ricans and

blacks will always be under dogs. (PP 2,8)

This student’s letter documents how he grapples with the irresolvable contradiction between the promise of liberal democracy and the subjugation of racialized bodies. This contradiction continues to haunt the contemporary debates on Puerto Rican debt: analysts erroneously read Puerto Rico’s debt crisis as the result of poor choices made on equal footing, yet the reality of the debt as an inherent and inherited result of Puerto Rico’s colonial status and racialized subjecthood within U.S. capitalism always reveals itself

(just as the structural oppression of the “under dogs” re-emerges in the letter-writer’s argument about opportunities for Blacks and Puerto Ricans).158 The underlying pedagogical framework operating in contemporary debates on Puerto Rican debt is a legacy of the banking pedagogical metrics of Pietri’s era, the effects of which he represents in “Puerto Rican Obituary.” The student’s critique of this poem also echoes his classmates’ expectations about how audiences draw direct meaning from poetry, that

158 The erasure of the role of colonialism in such debates are not restricted to the case of Puerto Rico, as José Fusté’s work suggests. We can see its effects in other “laboratories” of U.S. colonialism and neo- colonialism, including the Philippines, Haiti, and Native American tribal territories in the United States

219 readers, like students in a “banking” pedagogical environment, obediently and silently receive the meaning bestowed upon them. However, through his and the others’ letters, we see that the specific distance materializing within the poetics of “Puerto Rican

Obituary,” when registered by these young readers, creates a crucial space for dialogue that contributes to the realization of the anticolonial mandate of the poem, and ultimately to its significance. Freire argues that such dialogue is fundamental to the antidote to banking pedagogy. Liberation, he asserts, cannot rely on the propaganda implanted by an individual leader (or the message of a single poet): “The correct method lies in dialogue.

The conviction of the oppressed that they must fight for their liberation is not a gift bestowed by the revolutionary leadership, but the result of their own conscientização”

(67).159 But that dialogue, whether within the space of a classroom or the space of a poem, demands a radical kind of risk.

Both poetic and pedagogical acts of transformative creation require the risk of open and potentially “disobedient” reception by the reader and the learner. Pietri embraces that risk in making space for and saving the students’ letters, which are somewhat critical of his poetic representation and even accuse him of indifference to his

Puerto Rican community. That gesture underscores how the risk of a reader’s open interpretation is crucial for the efficacy of Pietri’s pedagogy, for while such risk can lead to, in the eyes of the artist or the scholar, an “erroneous” analysis, it generates new ideas and new learning processes. The destabilizing space of poetry, just as in the space of a classroom built against replicating the “banking” pedagogical hierarchies of racial

159 According to Freire’s translator, “The term conscientização refers to learning to perceive social, political, and economic contradictions, and to take action against the oppressive elements of reality” (Ramos 35).

220 capitalism, makes room for that risk. The role of risk in the holistic space of Pietri’s poetics is another way of recognizing what Urayoán Noel identifies as the interdependence of visible and invisible identity-formation in Pietri’s poetry (In/Visible

18). This interdependence destabilizes poetic and interpretive conventions, asking readers to do their own work in “making their way through a maze of signs” in disparate discourses, forms, and voices, which come together to “underscore the interdependence of identities” (21, 22). That interdependence also exists between the poem and the dialogical, pedagogical space of its readers. The classroom becomes an extension, an afterlife, of the poetic space of the poem—fulfilling the decolonizing pedagogical promise of Nuyorican poetry.

Perhaps the best insight into the way in which Pietri expanded his poetics into the learning space of a classroom is through a series of saved student drawings that appear to be covers for a class poetry collection (PP 69, 9). From these drawings, we can gain a sense of some of the language Pietri might have used to get his students to think about

Figure 3-1: Student Drawing. Box 69, Folder 9, Series VI: Subject Files. The Pedro Pietri Papers, Archives of Puerto Rican Diaspora. Author’s scan of photocopy made by the Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños.

221 how one does poetry, what poetry itself does, and toward which communities that doing is directed. One young artist models how they are “‘working’ [their] way to ‘poetry,’” carefully qualifying both the idea of “working” and the idea of “poetry” (Fig. 1). The qualification of “working,” while emphasizing the learning process as something in- formation rather than the product of a fixed, finished form, suggests that the author is re- appropriating the terms of labor. Similarly, the qualification of “poetry” suggests that the author wants to destabilize how readers understand and interact with poetry: the form it takes, how it comes to be, what it means, and where it happens. A boy with dark hair and glasses, wearing a shirt that reads “futur [sic] poet,” instructively points to the summit of

“poet hill.” That sense of futurity embodied by this student-poet figure connects the poet- learners of Pietri’s class to the alternative futures they have the imaginative capacity to create, a future that exists in a verdant and fertile environment full of the fruits and flowers of the poets’ knowledge, rather than in the inherited cycle of debt and death fueling the “long subway ride” in “Puerto Rican Obituary.”

Another drawing (Fig. 2) demonstrates 30,000,000 poems as cargo on a ship with a military designation, the “U.S.S. Poetry,” suggesting both the omnipresence of the U.S. military and the urgent, aggressive character of the intervention of its poetic cargo. A disembodied figure calls down from the clouds, “Wanted!! Poems of all sizes, shapes, etc., ALIVE or DEAD.” The language of the “wanted poster” echoes the popular genre of the Hollywood American Western, which romanticized the violence of U.S. settler- colonialism as “manifest destiny.” This wanted poster imperative, however, is clarified

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Figure 3-2: Student Drawing. Box 69, Folder 9, Series VI: Subject Files. The Pedro Pietri Papers, Archives of Puerto Rican Diaspora. Author’s scan of photocopy made by the Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños. with the caveat “Hey!! You better Read these Poems!!”—making poetry the destiny of readers and sea monsters alike. The artist’s choice of a cargo ship as the vessel of transport for the poetry, a ship sailing in accordance with the Jones Act,160 no less, is stunningly resonant of the migration of Puerto Ricans to the mainland, and reminds us of the deeper history of racial capitalism: the middle passage of enslaved Africans to the

Caribbean as cargo; and the movement of migrants who become seen as expendable but necessary “waste” on U.S. territory, but who are, in fact, also “futur poets.”

These covers represent the praxis of Pietri’s poetics of learning. Across Pietri’s work, poetic learning emerges as a pathway to self-determination against an entrenched pedagogy of indebtedness. His praxis reminds us that literary work not only communicates knowledge, but also knowledge processes and the communities from which those processes grow.

160 The Merchant Marine Act of 1920, more commonly known as the Jones Act, regulates commerce between the island of Puerto Rico and the mainland of the U.S. It requires that all goods transported by water be sailed through U.S. ports and on ships under the U.S. flag.

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THE ETHICS OF ACCOUNTABILITY

About three weeks after Hurricane María made landfall in Puerto Rico, Trump loosed a series of late night tweets that pivoted the root of the humanitarian crisis on the island away from his own administration’s failure to rally aid and toward Puerto Rico’s failure of “accountability.” He tweets that "Puerto Rico survived the Hurricanes, now a financial crisis looms largely of their own making says Sharyl Attkisson. A total lack of.....[sic],” continuing in a second tweet, “…accountability say [sic] the Governor.

Electric and all infrastructure was disaster before hurricanes….[sic]”

(@realDonaldTrump).161 Trump’s use of the term “accountability” has its roots in a liberal notion of an individual’s responsibility as a self-determined, incorporated subject.

But in a context of historically systemic oppression, this usage of accountability covers over the erasure of this imagined “accountable” subject. Where people have been historically subjected under an oppressive power, “accountability” takes on the meaning of a banking framework of hierarchical responsibility for others, rather than communal responsibility to them. Trump’s deployment of accountability establishes a kind of non- alignment with the deconstruction of colonial power and ways of knowing, which is why he resonates so much with communities that have benefited from those systems. In the

United States, these debates around economic accountability, as well as its definitions, map onto those in pedagogical circles regarding low-income schools serving students of color. In this context, we see how the effects of measures taken such as “No Child Left

161 Trump’s citation of Sharyl Attkisson was in reference to a piece she had written for The Hill (Chappell).

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Behind”162 are a not-so-distant cousin of the effects of the PROMESA bill. Similarly, the same notion of accountability that naturalizes Puerto Rican debt can be seen driving the crisis of student debt in U.S. higher education; the “living dead” and the “living indebted” both find themselves vilified in Trump’s tweets.163

In both cases, the metrics of accountability are built for a banking pedagogy that fuels a cycle of indebtedness, both financial and cultural. Katharine N. Rankin argues that

“the limits of ‘liberal benevolence’ speak to the need for an ethics of accountability that recognizes the conditions of postcoloniality—but that can also foreground the relational subjectivities of planners and beneficiaries more generally with an eye to broaching the normative terrain of ‘what is to be done?’” (183). Rankin’s comments suggest that in order to rupture a cycle of indebtedness, accountability cannot be rooted in the same relational structure that Freire identified as suffering from “narration sickness,” one whose “fundamentally narrative character” plots people as inculto, inherently-lacking receptacles to be filled with “authoritative” information (Freire 71; original emphasis).

Her comments also suggest that a truly inclusive and liberatory conception of human rights cannot be rooted in this relational structure, either.

Perhaps Pedro Pietri saw poetic learning as the antidote to what Freire saw as the monological narrative nature of a banking pedagogy. In the more expansive terrain of his poetics and pedagogy, Pietri shifts these shared terms of accountability. The banking pedagogical metrics of racial capitalism that Pietri and the Nuyorican poets were resisting

162 The No Child Left Behind Act (2001) enacted a federal mandate for standardized testing that doubled down on a deficit model of instruction and assessment, and encouraged a view of public education as a competitive marketplace rather than a public good. 163 See the Pew Research Center for 2017 statistics on U.S. student debt, which has reached more than 1.3 trillion dollars (Cillufo). See also Annie McClanahan’s “The Living Indebted: Student Militancy and the Financialization of Debt,” Qui Parle: Critical Humanities and Social Sciences 20.1 (2011), pp. 57-77.

225 in the Long Sixties continue to shape relations between Puerto Rico and the mainland today. Pietri’s praxis presents not just a poetic representation—that is, a finished form— but a process, a formation through which we might shift this embedded but persistent rhetorical framework circumscribing contemporary debates about Puerto Rican debt that reiterate the liberal, Enlightenment roots of human rights discourse. Pietri shows us that poetic writing, as an act of learning, can foster knowledge out of the obituary of colonial indebtedness, and build a discursive bridge toward the way that Gloria Anzaldúa characterizes learning: “coming to know the other / not coming to take her” (Interviews

45).

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CONCLUSION

AN AESTHETIC CURRICULUM FOR WILLFUL LEARNING

“Young people love to learn but hate to be taught. They learn best through guided play. I am convinced . . . that this is true for adults too because play doesn’t stop for human beings.”

-Doris Sommer, The Work of Art in the World: Civic Agency and Public Humanities

In her hemispheric study of racial thought among thinkers Frederick Douglass,

Domingo Sarmiento, W. E. B. DuBois, and José Vasconcelos, Juliet Hooker adopts a methodological approach of juxtaposition, as opposed to comparison, and advocates that doing so is an ethical practice for scholars engaged in hemispheric American studies. She writes, “By definition juxtaposition places two disparate objects side by side, and it is by being viewed simultaneously that the viewer’s understanding of each object is transformed” (13). For Hooker, juxtaposition avoids the implicit ranking, essentialization, and even elision that can occur in some methodologies of comparison. I would contend, however, that such an approach is well within the realm of the “comparative” in comparative literature. Though the cases I have addressed from Argentina, Mexico, and

Puerto Rico are linked broadly by the colonial history of the Americas, as well as the epoch of the Long Sixties, my purpose has been to engage them in just such a comparative juxtaposition.

By engaging in hemispheric juxtaposition, I have been able to create a comparative constellation that elucidates the stakes and formations of educability within human rights discourse, and further, how literature plays a role in maintaining,

227 intervening in, and revising these notions of educability. Juxtaposition has enabled me to attend to the distinctive formation of personal and structural violence in each case, while casting these questions of educability, which are already implicit in the rich discourse on these cases, into relief. My study would not have been possible if I had read these cases strictly within the usual circuits of their critical traditions. The two Alicias of The Little

School and La historia oficial would be read on the terms of the memory and trauma of

Argentina’s Proceso; Amuleto would remain within the canon of Bolaño’s games of world literature; and Puerto Rican Obituary’s formal and linguistic innovations would remain read in terms of Latina/o/x identity formation. In other words, maintaining the cases’ “willfulness” to a homogenizing comparison has been the generative impetus of my study. That being said, there are two common intersections of educability, human rights, and literature across these cases that I want to emphasize at this dissertation’s conclusion. Indeed, we can understand them in terms of Schillingsburg’s intersecting axes of analysis—the axis of the mimetic, what I call the form, and the axis of the rhetorical, what I call the formation.

Each of these cases demonstrates that literature itself can be a medium of pedagogical theorization.164 Literature is not only an object to be taught or a space of encounter, but an author’s (and audience’s) articulation of pedagogical imaginings that cannot be expressed through other forms. Through The Little School, Alicia Partnoy proposes an intervention into the instructional foundation of the violence of Argentina’s last dictatorship, and through La historia oficial, its filmmakers elaborate upon how that

164 I use the term “literature” throughout my conclusion to indicate “cultural text” broadly defined: for my purposes, the distinct genres of testimonio, film, novella, and poetry that I have discussed in this dissertation.

228 instructional foundation continued to exist in hegemonic metrics of democratization as cultural “re-education.” Through Amuleto, Roberto Bolaño stages the very process of literary remembering as a process of counter-hegemonic learning. For Pedro Pietri, poetry enables a multimodal, inclusive, and decolonial pedagogy. My contention that each of these texts models distinctive aesthetic articulations of pedagogy returns us to the uncomfortable notion of reading literature as curricular form. But, as I hope I have by now demonstrated, the discomfort of this idea does not reflect any inherent instrumentalization in such a notion. Rather, it suggests that we harbor an underlying conception of pedagogy itself as instrumentalization, and relatedly, a conflation of curricula with pedagogy. Scholars readily argue that through literature, authors articulate non-hegemonic forms of knowledge within hegemonic epistemologies; each of these texts demonstrates that literature can also create a map of knowledge-development processes—of anti-hegemonic pedagogy.

Though I do not propose to read literature as curricula, given my shared wariness of instrumentalizing literature, discourses within curriculum studies actually offer much for imagining the artful and formative overlapping spaces of aesthetics and learning. One compelling example is Pauline Sameshima’s work. Drawing from William Pinar and others,165 Sameshima re-imagines “the liminal space” of curricula as “a generative place of knowledge construction” (Seeing Red 287). She does so by returning to the root of the word “curriculum,” the Latin word currere, which “describes the process and multi- directional movement of learning, of the relational aspects of knowledge production in a

165 See, for example, William Pinar’s The Character of Curriculum Studies: Bildung, Currere, and the Recurring Question of the Subject (2011) and Madeleine Grumet’s “Curriculum and the art of daily life” (1991).

229 dialogic and dialectic space between learner and others” (287). Sameshima integrates aesthetic form as a practice of pedagogy in her own pursuit of what she calls “artful scholarly inquiry.”166 In Seeing Red (2007), her dissertation written in the form of a

Bildungsroman, Sameshima imagines a practice of pedagogy called “embodied aesthetic wholeness,” which “attends to teaching and learning holistically through the body with consideration to: increasing receptivity and openness to learning; fostering skills of relationality; modeling wholeness-in-progress in explicit reflexive texts” (xii). For

Sameshima, curriculum is an aesthetic space that attends to both the form and formation of multiple modes of reading and learning. In drawing from literary art as a form that offers potential for scholarly work in education, Sameshima articulates a method for reading literature as a pedagogical space outside of a banking pedagogy. In countering the notion of curriculum itself as an instrumentalization of students (and of teachers), her approach also presents a potential corrective to treating literature as pedagogy that avoids a banking curriculum. It is crucial to remember, however, that the pedagogy proposed through any of the texts I discussed in this dissertation is separate from that pedagogy that occurs among authors and audiences; in other words—the map is not the territory.

This point brings me to the second common intersection of these cases, what is perhaps the most important idea that these texts propose about human rights: the concept of willful learning as a process of aesthetic formation, and of the willful learner as an educable subject. Across these cases, willful learning is the point of parallax between resistance and resilience, between the subjects in human rights texts (the protagonists, the

166 Sameshima published her dissertation as the book Seeing Red: A Pedagogy of Parallax; An Epistolary Bildungsroman on Artful Scholarly Inquiry.

230 abuelas, etc.) and the subjects of human rights texts (the audiences, the learners of human rights literature). The Little School, as a literary-pedagogical theorization, enabled my articulation of this concept; engaging with La historia oficial then rendered it more vividly. The willful learning of the Alicias, and the willful learning invited by their texts, helped me consider Auxilio as a willful narrator, and Amuleto as an enactment of willful learning of Tlatelolco remembrance. These analyses set us up to recognize Pietri’s poetry and praxis as a powerful demonstration of how, when living under structural violence, the cultivation of willful learning is a matter of life and death.

Following Sara Ahmed (and Alicia Partnoy), I have reclaimed the pejorative connotation of willfulness; I recognize, though, that willful learning holds this pejorative meaning close, as a way of orienting against hegemonic power—specifically against white, heteronormative supremacy. In this sense, willful learning is a corollary to bell hooks’ double connotation of “teaching to transgress”: one teaches the art of transgression, and one teaches in order to transgress. hooks writes, “To educate as the practice of freedom is a way of teaching that anyone can learn” (Teaching 13). Similarly, willful learning is a praxis of counter-hegemonic frameworks of knowledge and educability against white heteronormative supremacy. Willful learning, then, has as much potential to be embodied by a queer woman of color as by a cis-gendered white male, but the relative motivation of the latter to engage with it as a means of redistributing hegemonic power is distinctively more limited. I agree with Emily Hind in that I do not want to fall into the essentializing “booby trap” of attributing the decolonial and feminist exploration of difference, and of willful learning, only to women and writers of color

(23). However, in the case of those who have benefited from structures of violence,

231 willful learning calls us to orient that willfulness toward our own complicity and the

“conditions of privilege from which there is no clause for opting out”—to reflexively examine the ways in which we came to our knowledges, and in doing so, re-open dialogues and distributions of authority that our inherited “dubious stories” have foreclosed (Jolly 9).

In this way, willful learning is both a suggestive and troubling concept for the field of comparative literature because of its capacity to be instrumentalized. This possibility haunts the crisis of comparative literature to which Gayatri Spivak responds in

Death of a Discipline (2003). Spivak contends that “[i]f a responsible comparativism can be of the remotest possible use in the training of the imagination, it must approach culturally diversified ethical systems diachronically, through the history of multicultural empires, without foregone conclusions. This is the material that is used to fashion violence in the multiform global imaginary” (Death 17). Spivak’s contention is that, by maintaining a commitment to rigorous language, comparative literature can fulfill its aspiration to, in her evocative phrasing, act as a supplement to “the impatient bounty of human rights” (18). Even while her attention is on language, however, Spivak exemplifies this argument through an anecdote of her experience sitting in on “so-called remedial classes” in the public university system of CUNY (City University of New

York). She describes witnessing the disappearance of an imagined universality of discrete

European languages through the Haitian and West African students in these classes. She relates that

I have learned something from listening to their talk about and in

Creole/French/so-called pidgin and English-as-a-second-language-crossing-into-

232

first—the chosen tongue. I have silently compared their imaginative flexibility, so

remarkably and necessarily much stronger, because constantly in use for social

survival and mobility, than that of the Columbia undergraduate, held up by the

life-support system of a commercializing Anglophone culture that trivializes the

humanities. (16)

Spivak effectively uses this anecdote to advocate for a redoubled commitment to localized, descriptively grammatical language learning as a practice of ethical literary analysis. But if we step back from focusing on language usage in this story and look at the scenario in which this language is being employed, we see that it is a story about learning as a practice of poetic imagination—of that elusive “imagining otherness” promised by the study of literature. Furthermore, it is a story that centralizes students as the source of that poetic imagination; Spivak’s anecdote might fit just as well in the newsletter of the Teachers and Writers Collaborative as it does in her monograph. That the students are in the so-called remedial classes underscores their status as maleducada, as “bad students,” but also as students whose capacity for willful learning (willful to hegemonic language, willful to the social and educational hierarchies embodied by the

Ivy League), for Spivak, reinvigorates the lifeblood of the humanities.

The presence of the willful learner in all of these pedagogical spaces underscores the urgency for scholars to interrogate what I have called our “blind spot,” the underlying metrics of educability in human rights and literary discourses—precisely because of the capacity for willful learning to be hijacked by hegemonic discourse. Not doing so can result in enabling, as Rosemary Jolly writes, the fundamentalism of racists, misogynists, and xenophobes (11). We see this possibility play out in the speech that U.S. Secretary of

233

Education Betsy DeVos delivered to the Conservative Political Action Conference

(CPAC) in 2017. She says:

Now let me ask you: how many of you are college students? The fight against the

education establishment extends to you too. The faculty, from adjunct professors

to deans, tell you what to do, what to say, and more ominously, what to think.

They say that if you voted for Donald Trump, you’re a threat to the university

community. But the real threat is silencing the First Amendment rights of people

with whom you disagree. (Strauss)

DeVos hijacks the language of dissent in order to position students of universities as the victims of a banking pedagogy, urging them to conflate pedagogy itself with instrumentalization. Even in the midst of enacting the pedagogy she critiques, she mobilizes the notion of willfulness under such a regime as a means of galvanizing those who feel threatened by its fundamental decolonial, antiracist (and thus truly democratizing) act.

It would be easy (and well-founded) to dismiss DeVos’s rhetoric as abhorrent, condemn her neoliberalism, and leave it that. But what if we were to take DeVos’s accusation seriously? I do not mean “seriously” in the sense of validating a political critique that insidiously appropriates decolonizing discourse as a means of protecting white supremacy. Rather, I mean, what if we were to engage with it as an invitation to consider the way in which institutions of education, including our traditions of scholarship, enact pedagogical objectification? As DeVos’s rhetoric demonstrates, conflating pedagogy itself with banking pedagogy objectifies both teachers and students.

234 bell hooks observes that such objectification “denigrate[s] notions of wholeness and upholds the idea of a mind/body split, one that promotes and supports compartmentalization” (Teaching 16). hooks’ observation highlights that what drives this objectification is a metric of educability based in the liberal framework of the

Enlightenment, the same metric that has dominated human rights discourse. hooks goes on to observe that this framework “reinforces the dualistic separation of public and private, encouraging teachers and students to see no connection between life practices, habits of being, and the roles of professors” (16). Thus, the question that DeVos’s troubling speech has us ask, uncomfortably, is: how do we implicitly embody our students, those in the classroom and those we imagine as the audiences of human rights literature, as learners within the written and physical spaces of our instruction? And in embodying or objectifying them, how do we either embody or objectify ourselves in those spaces? DeVos (and her president) certainly prove that there is a very fine line between ethical and appropriative deployments of willful learning, but it is a line that The

Little School, La historia oficial, Amuleto, and Puerto Rican Obituary enable us to scrutinize.

What if, for example, we read Amuleto not as the representation of an atrocity that happened to occur at a university, but as a pointed critique of the structural violence that occurs specifically in the space of the university? The tableau of Auxilio bastioned in the bathroom in Amuleto is not such a far cry from that of a SWAT team being called onto the University of California–Riverside’s campus to manage protests against policies that would plunge students and contingent faculty into further precarity; or from the abduction and incarceration of Palestinian student activists in Ramallah; or from the disappearance

235 of 40 students (teachers in training, no less) in Igualá, Mexico; or from the militarization and privatization of university police departments in the era of Black Lives Matter student activism (Chatterjee and Maira 1, 5; Bauman). Some scholars might not be convinced by these grounds as a mandate for such reading, but this approach would still suit a literary analysis that prioritizes close reading within the Bolaño-verse, as Martin

Paul Eve’s reading of 2666 demonstrates.167

Eve reads Bolaño’s metafictional strategies (his games) of “showing” rather than

“telling” in 2666 as an “attempt to teach, perhaps redeem, the academy” (950). He grounds his argument in how Bolaño structurally twins the police force with the university, and further, with the way that academic institutions safeguard particular traditions of literary interpretation. The same could be said of Amuleto, in which

Auxilio’s representation of a woman-of-color pedagogy offers an even sharper version of this critique. Eve argues that 2666 demonstrates “an ethics that asks us to believe once more in the political, utopian and didactic function of writing, both critical and creative.

Critics must not, though, be didactic. Bolaño makes it clear enough that this task is to be left to fiction” (962). If we think of Amuleto as a critique of authoritarian institutions of education, then Bolaño’s lesson is to interrogate the conflation of the liberal subject with the educable subject.

Such a critique ultimately positions literary scholars and educators of human rights literature as Amuleto’s learners; we, too, are the educable subjects of human rights literature—not simply its stewards. Amuleto’s frenzied fusion of the institutional spaces

167 See Eve’s “Keep writing: the critique of the university in Roberto Bolaño’s 2666” (2015).

236 of literature and education invites scholars to consider how we make space for and cultivate willful learning in the way we interpret the intersections of literature, human rights, and social justice. It furthermore encourages us to consider that if we are not doing so in our scholarship, it is unlikely that we are doing so with learners in our classrooms.

Bolaño’s book, then, is a “curriculum” for willful learning in a way that literary criticism or classroom lesson plans cannot be.

We can see indications of the conflation of the liberal subject with the educable subject, and the way that doing so safeguards white, heteronormative supremacy, in the implicit liberal humanist metrics that drive contemporary actions and discourses on university campuses. The 2017 incident that occurred during Charles Murray’s visit to

Middlebury College offers an instructive example.168 Students attended his talk but turned their back on Murray while he spoke. Later their protests turned raucous, and a professor escorting Murray out of the venue was injured as a result. Their response became a rallying call for professors who see the rhetoric of universities as “safe spaces” as antithetical to learning. One of these responses, Flagg Taylor’s, highlights how the conflation of the liberal subject with the educable subject enables Taylor to condemn the protesting students and the university environment that seems to encourage them, while appropriating the language of dissent for conservatism.169

168 In his (in)famous book The Bell Curve (1994), co-written with Richard Herrnstein, Murray advances an argument that naturalizes a person’s degree of intelligence to their conditions of wealth or poverty, and further, affixes the distribution of intelligence to the standard deviation of a “bell curve” (one that mirrors wealth distribution itself). Though the book has been discussed, elaborated upon, and discredited in many circles, its ideas remains a driving force behind racist policies. Middlebury College created a webpage with details about the incident, college statements, community resources, reflections of those involved and community members more broadly, selected media coverage, and contact information for further follow-up (“Information on Charles Murray Visit”). 169 See “The Meaning of Middlebury” (2017).

237

Taylor’s piece bemoans that liberal arts colleges, the purported bastions of critical and creative thought, have become simply “training” grounds for politically correct positions. Taylor champions the Cartesian duality of the liberal subject when he argues that the goal of cultivating the mind is at odds with the popular university rhetoric of cultivating “passion” and “engagement” among students. He writes that “it is wrong . . . to think that liberal arts colleges can ‘train’ students and strive for relevancy while also remaining dedicated to the cultivation of the mind. ‘Passion’ and ‘engagement’ are not only poor substitutes for virtues like moderation, courage, and prudence—they create an environment hostile to their cultivation” (“The Meaning of Middlebury”). Within

Taylor’s critique, we can hear echoes of the metric of educability implicit in the liberal discourse of the human rights-bearing personality: students’ minds must exert mastery over their undisciplined bodies; students are assumed to be incorporated into this education by the very fact of their presence on a campus.

Taylor’s comments demonstrate a third assumption that also exists in the liberal conception of human rights educability: that the pedagogical processes by which we identify and measure students’ adoption of these educational “virtues” are rooted in these same distinctions and assumed incorporation. This is why Taylor conflates students’ demonstration of affect with their being unthinking, ineducable subjects, and perceives that very affective demonstration to be a danger to education itself. It is this conflation that is instrumentalized by someone like DeVos. As a result, the anxiety that Allan

Bloom attempts to generate about the failures of students and university education in The

Closing of the American Mind (1987) materializes, but as the reverse of the apocalypse he felt that the liberation movements of the Long Sixties foretold. Scholars who are

238 invested in the politics of those movements, too, are in danger of enabling this conflation and its instrumentalization, if we do not account for both who and how we are imagining our learners as educable subjects—their form and their formation.

Contrary to Taylor’s fears, embodying learners’ capacity for willfulness can both safeguard critical-creative thought and help to counteract the appropriation of minoritized voices and actions for white heteronormative supremacy. bell hooks is again helpful here.

She discusses how experience is “a special way of knowing” that must be validated, but that can, at the same time, reductively essentialize minoritized learners. She reflects:

If I do not wish to see these students use the “authority of experience” as a means

of asserting voice, I can circumvent this possible misuse of power by bringing to

the classroom pedagogical strategies that affirm their presence, their right to

speak, in multiple ways in diverse topics. . . . If experience is already invoked in

the classroom as a way of knowing that coexists in a nonhierarchical way with

other ways of knowing, then it lessens the possibility that it can be used to silence.

(Teaching 90; 84) hooks’ pedagogical approach in the classroom echoes Juliet Hooker’s methodological practice of juxtaposition in scholarly writing (another space of pedagogy); both locate complexity and difference as the source of generating new understandings.

As scholar-educators, then, maintaining our own willfulness within the institutions in which we are complicit is crucial for safeguarding willful learning, and the pedagogies of human rights, from instrumentalization. We must be self-vigilant, to turn to Kelly Oliver’s term, and listen to the silences, the absent educabilities, “in which we

239 are implicated and through which we are responsible to each other” (133). Even while, for example, Arizona’s HB 2281 bill banning ethnic studies has been condemned as a human rights violation when measured by the U.N.’s human rights doctrines,170 Roderick

Ferguson observes that universities have incorporated ethnic studies, and other canons of

“minority insurgence,” as a “disembodied and abstract promotion of minority representation without fully satisfying the material and social redistribution of minoritized subjects, particularly where people of color are concerned,” a strategy that he argues encourages us to forget how these movements “promoted the inseparability of

[redistribution and representation]” (Ferguson 8). Just as Ferguson returns to the era of the Long Sixties to understand what he calls this “archival economy,” the enduring presence of these Long Sixties figures of willful learning in the canons of human rights literature reveal the means and conditions through which the appropriation and instrumentalization of “human rights” occurs.

Both Flagg Taylor’s and Roderick Ferguson’s arguments leave us with the same question: in institutional economies “designed to produce somebody individuated, assimilated, and consenting to empire,” as Alexis Pauline Gumbs beautifully phrases it,

“is it possible instead to become nobody in the academic space? Is it possible to align with the illegible oppressed/contemporary subaltern, the falling apart abject nonsubject, inside a university English class?” (Gumbs 237). Gumbs poses this question as an entry into the poetry and pedagogy of June Jordan and Audre Lorde; we might also think of the

Alicias, of Auxilio, of Pietri and his young poets. One answer that these figures offer is that the protection and cultivation of our willful learners and their poetic imaginations, as

170 See Julian Kunnie (2010) and Roberto Rodriguez (2011).

240 well as the poetic, transgressive coalitions of educability, is the shared urgent and fortunate task of literature, literary criticism, and literary education. As participants in these institutions, we scholar-educators must approach this task by keeping the most fully embodied versions of our learners at the forefront of our work. If we learn anything from the aspirations of Betsy DeVos’s argument, it is that foisting willfulness upon our learners is perhaps as damaging as denying them a capacity for willfulness. Or, we can learn from Cathy Davidson’s more positively-framed version of this argument: as

Davidson wrote in an online discussion on student-centered learning, “by finding a voice, one does not need to be told to question power. By feeling empowered, one begins to question power” (“By Feeling Empowered”).

Davidson’s comment invites me to end where I began: with Boubacar, and my own ongoing formation as a learner-teacher.

After I finished drafting my prospectus, I asked Boubacar what the most impactful book from our class was for him. His answer was not one of the books my co- teacher and I had included because we thought our students might see themselves in their protagonists, such as Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007),

Sherman Alexie’s The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (2007), or educator

Geoffrey Canada’s memoir of growing up in Harlem, Fist Stick Knife Gun: A Personal

History of Violence (1995). No; his favorite book was perhaps the most traditionally canonical of all U.S. high school texts: George Orwell’s Animal Farm. Why? “Because history repeats itself.” I loved his answer, because it demonstrates Boubacar’s

“willfulness” to our own pedagogical imaginings as benevolent, all-knowing, we-will- liberate-you white teachers. How should educators and scholars invested in literature and

241 literary education as a means of re-conceptualizing human rights and justice interpret

Boubacar’s choice?

The plural of anecdote is not data. That is to say: Boubacar’s affinity for Animal

Farm does not mean that it is a “better text” for teaching about human rights, or structural violence, than a text that may have, on paper, reflected something closer to his own background. His answer, however, does highlight the limitation of human rights discourse that relies on the representation of character. As his teacher, I assumed that a representative character would be the best vehicle for his exploration of issues in human rights and social justice; but Boubacar sought something beyond the articulation of character, his or anyone else’s—something unknowable through character alone. Our conversation sticks with me because it reminds me to shift how I identify a “human rights text” from its narrative content to the kind of pedagogy such a text might propose, and further, to how a text might invite Boubacar to imagine himself as its learner. In the context of our class and that moment in his life, what space did Animal Farm make for him? The best I can hope for is that there was something in the allegory that helped him explore his own willful capacity as part of a lifelong learning process of becoming in the world. Whatever he cultivated while reading that story, and continues to cultivate, I am positive that it represents a more liberatory imagining of justice and human rights than any teacher, or any book, could have conceived on his behalf.

242

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VITA MOLLY DOOLEY APPEL EDUCATION Ph.D. in Comparative Literature. The Pennsylvania State University 2018 Doctoral minor in Latin American Studies.

M.S. in Teaching, Pace University. 2009 Specialization in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages.

B.A. in Mythology and Folklore (Self-Determined), Skidmore College 2007

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS and PRESENTATIONS

“Writing out of the Obituary: Puerto Rican Indebtedness and Poetic Learning in the Work Pedro Pietri" in Chiricú Journal: Latina/o Literatures, Arts, and Cultures. Spring 2018 Special Issue, “Vox Latinx: Literature and Politics in the Twenty-first Century,” ed. Amanda M. Smith.

Forthcoming: “The Art of the Social Movement Corrective: On Redeeming the Human Rights Narrative in También la lluvia and Our Brand Is Crisis.” Human Rights and Latin American Cinema, Eds. Mariana Cunha and Antonio Marcio. Palgrave MacMillan (Expected publication: Fall 2018).

“The Pedagogical Poetics of Testimony: How The Little School Teaches us to Be Ethical Learners.” Modern Language Association 2018 annual meeting in New York City, NY.

SELECTED WORK EXPERIENCE

Academic Dean of Johns Hopkins University Program Site, the JHU Center for Talented Youth (Summer, 2018) English 15: Rhetoric and Composition, Instructor of Record (2014-2015) English as a Second Language Instructor, Temple University Intensive English Language Program (2011-2012) English as a Second Language, English Language Arts, and Humanities Teacher, Bronx Expeditionary Learning High School (Now Bronx Collegiate Academy) (2008-2011)

HONORS and AWARDS at PENN STATE

Forrest S. Crawford Graduate Fellowship in Ethical Inquiry 2016-2017 Rock Ethics Institute Scholarship 2016-2017 Liberal Arts RGSO Spring Dissertation Grant 2015 The Center for Global Studies Fall Fellowship 2015 Two-year Summer Research Funding Fellowship (Dept. of Comp. Lit.). 2012-2014