Ripped Apart: Unsettling Narratives of Transnational Migration

By Vanessa de Veritch Woodside

Ripped Apart: Unsettling Narratives of Transnational Migration is an innovative and interdisciplinary analysis of Latina narratives of transnational migration that underscore the intersections of the physical, psychological, sociocultural, and legal / structural traumas endured by migrants and their families. Grounded in theories of narrative empathy and the representation of trauma, Ripped Apart analyzes the techniques that Latina writers of various literary genres deploy to develop empathy, interrogate the representation of migrants in dominant discourse, and condemn the structures and institutions that continue to contribute to the separation of families.

An excellent introduction to critical Latina texts that address migration and family separation, Ripped Apart incorporates an overview of US immigration policies and practices and notions of citizenship, legality, and whiteness that have resulted in conceptualizations of immigrants as permanent foreigners, criminals, or threats to US society, and provides sociohistorical context regarding the often obscured or omitted historical chapters that serve as the texts’ backdrops. In describing how and why Latina narratives reveal the hidden stories of the impact of transnational migration on women and children, Ripped Apart demonstrates the power of literature and storytelling to unsettle the reader, modify cognitive schemas, and create real-world positive change.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Texas Tech University Press
• Release date: Feb 19, 2021
• ISBN: 9781682830727

Vanessa de Veritch Woodside

Vanessa de Veritch Woodside is an Associate Professor of Spanish Languages and Cultures at the University of Washington Tacoma, where she teaches courses in Spanish and Latin American and Latinx Studies. Her research focuses on the subversive power of storytelling, implementation of innovative pedagogical techniques, and community-engaged partnerships with local immigrant and refugee communities and nonprofits that serve them.

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Ripped Apart

Unsettling Narratives of Transnational Migration

Vanessa de Veritch Woodside

Texas Tech University Press

Copyright © 2021 by Texas Tech University Press

All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, including electronic storage and retrieval systems, except by explicit prior written permission of the publisher. Brief passages excerpted for review and critical purposes are excepted.

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Cover design by Hannah Gaskamp

Library of Congress Control Number: 2020945335

ISBN: 978-1-68283-071-0 (cloth)

ISBN: 978-1-68283-072-7 (ebook)

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Contents

Chapter 1

Historia(s) of Borderlands Violence: Telling the Tales of Historical and Contemporary Violence

The Power of Stories to Expose Violent Truths of History

Intersecting Nodes of Violence in Latina Literary Production

The Racialization and Policing of Immigration

Families Divided by Borders

Chapter 2

Coming of Age amid Revolutions and Roundups

The Evolution and Regression of a Young Migrant in the Wake of Trauma

Overcoming Violence and Oppression in Shame the Stars and Esperanza Rising

All the Stars Denied and the Interrogation of Patriarchy and Shameful History

Chapter 3

Crying Out for Their Children: Central American Motherhood and Migration

In Search of Bernabé: Intergenerational Trauma and the Impossibility of Redemption

Converging (Narrative) Streams in The River Flows North

The Latent Presence of a Mother’s Absence

Transnational Migrants Seeking Refuge in The Cariboo Café

La Llorona as a Maternal Cultural Marker of Trauma

Chapter 4

Left Behind and Moving Forward (and Northward)

Crossing Mountains and Deserts in Search of Answers

Confronting Violence in Search of a Unified Family

Seeking Safety and Solace in The Only Road

Chapter 5

The Personal Is Political: Narrative Condemnations of Individual Tragedies of Transnational Migration

Deterrence, Disappearance, and Devastation

Writing / Righting the Impact of Interior Immigration Enforcement

Ocotillos, Prickly Politics, and Desert Blood

Desert Transformations

Chapter 6

Making the Invisible Trauma Visible through Testimonios, Ethnographies, and Memoirs

Ethnographic Exposés of the Violence Inherent in Transnational Separation

Left Behind in the US and Seeking a Sense of Home and Hope

Chapter 7

Reaching the Next Generation: Truth, History, and Hope for Change

A Focus on la Familia in the Face of Violence and Trauma

Teaching Empathy, Cultural Coalitions, and Social Change to the Next Generation

Illustrations

From Pancho Rabbit and the Coyote: A Migrant’s Tale, p. 4

From Pancho Rabbit and the Coyote: A Migrant’s Tale, p. 13

From Pancho Rabbit and the Coyote: A Migrant’s Tale, p. 16

From Pancho Rabbit and the Coyote: A Migrant’s Tale, p. 22

Detail from Codex Zouche-Nuttall

Interconnected Nodes of Violence

Ripped

Apart

Introduction

A mainstream media blitz ensued after the 2018 implementation of unabashedly severe policies directed toward immigrant families, many of whom had joined one of the first of various migrant caravans that continue to depart from Central America to present themselves at the US-Mexico border to request political asylum, as per US and international law. What began as a seemingly steady flow of network news proffering contrasting depictions of these migrants as, on the one hand, armies preparing for an imminent invasion of our Country (@realDonaldTrump 2018), and desperate refugees escaping inevitable poverty and death on the other, quickly evolved into a 24-hour cycle of reporting on the Trump administration’s intention to deter continued migration of families by making good on the threat of family separation as an element of the zero-tolerance policy for individuals who crossed the border without papers.

Mincing no words, then Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen justified the forcible separation of nearly 3,000 children as young as one year old from their parents, although it is evident that the logistics of such an operation were neither fully fleshed out nor apparent to those on the front lines of the impending crisis at the border. Jarring images of children crowded in chain-link cages began to permeate newspapers, television, and social media. When the Trump administration established a massive tent camp in Tornillo, Texas, to house unaccompanied minors in June 2018, images and descriptions of the haunting specter of internment and concentration camps of days gone by contributed to the mobilization of the general public, who were flabbergasted at the scope and intentionality of policies to create trauma among juveniles, a traditionally vulnerable population.

Amid the public outcry and a federal ruling, the administration reversed course and later in June indicated that children under the age of five would be reunited with their families by July 10 and that those over five would be reunited shortly thereafter on July 27. Nevertheless, there were still reportedly over 100 children separated from caretakers at the border even after the court order (Jordan 2019), as well as 500 minors in custody (Sacchetti 2018), generating additional controversy about gross underreporting of figures. As the Tornillo camp rapidly expanded—to a capacity of up to 3,000 youths prior to its ultimate closure in December 2018—community members across the nation no longer remained silent, horrified at the expansion of Tornillo and a similar camp in Homestead, Florida, particularly in light of the revelation of a simultaneous policy that resulted in the deportation of individuals who came forward to sponsor children in detention. Add to this the widespread concern about the death of two young Guatemalan migrants in US custody within three weeks in December 2018 and February 2019 reports indicating the implausibility of the Office of Refugee Resettlement’s ability to reunite the thousands of remaining children with their families due to flaws in tracking (Congressional Research Service 2019; Soboroff and Romero 2019) and it is logical that the public would take notice and express consternation and dissatisfaction at the state’s intentional use of psychological violence on adults and children alike as a deterrent to immigration.

Yet, perhaps it was Kim Kyung-Hoon’s November 2018 photograph of a mother and two diaper-clad children frantically fleeing tear gas launched by US border authorities that most broadly sparked outrage. Such imagery makes it difficult to deny the tangible evidence of violence perpetrated against migrants by the US government or the inherent risks of their journeys. Julia LeDuc’s June 2019 image of Óscar Alberto Martínez Ramírez and his 23-month-old daughter who drowned while crossing the Río Bravo—that eerily recalls Nilüfer Demir’s 2015 heart-wrenching image of drowned three-year-old Syrian refugee Alan Kurdi washed up on the beach—shook the international community. Similarly, although to a lesser degree, earlier images of unaccompanied minors in emergency shelters during the Obama administration’s response to the alarming humanitarian crisis caused by the influx of thousands of unaccompanied and undocumented child migrants from Mexico and Central America in 2014 simultaneously sensationalized the seemingly recent phenomenon and captured the human element of migration by thrusting images of the most vulnerable victims into the limelight. Although recent media attention focuses on the sudden surge of child migrants, in historical terms, the displacement and movement of women and children across la línea is in no way new, nor are the traumas associated with immigration.

The renewed interest and emotion invested in discussions regarding the problem of immigration bring to the forefront the limited access the general public has had to the stories and experiences of the actors at the center of the political debates until relatively recently. Prior to the depiction of the 2018–2019 and earlier 2014 crises at the border, there was seemingly little attention paid to the personal stories of immigrants in the media until undocumented and unafraid students took to social media to share their stories as Congress was slated to consider the DREAM Act, a 2009 proposal to provide legal status to undocumented youth who were brought to the US as children, graduated from US high schools, and attend college or enter the military. DREAMers took advantage of social media to articulate and disseminate their stories and experiences, and some media outlets soon followed suit, revealing the human element of migration by covering the public protests that drew attention to the injustice of students’ imminent deportations. However, mainstream attention to such matters remained relatively limited, even with an increasing number of activists speaking out, particularly after the proposal and April 2010 passage of Arizona’s anti-immigrant Senate Bill 1070. Notably, most of the positive coverage demonstrating the personal impact of immigration policies and practices on individuals tended to focus on select success stories of migrants that reflected hegemonic narratives of progress and assimilation.

At the time, such stories stood out as being extraordinary and exceptional in the midst of acerbic political rhetoric and a veritable media frenzy depicting the influx of immigrants from Mexico and Latin America as a fearsome deluge of derelicts and drains on the United States government and society, yet they failed to provide authentic representations of more widespread migrant families’ realities, which have largely been shaped by global factors beyond their control. Once again, these broader global factors—as well as a host of specific examples of US intervention in Latin America—that have driven waves of Latinx migration are omitted from most conversations about immigration in our current contentious climate of cultural confrontation that extends beyond political discourse exhorting the need to Make America Great Again to the broader propensity toward escalated interactions online and otherwise.

Some commentators attribute the increased tension to the rise of voices emboldened to articulate racist perspectives regarding immigrants to then presidential candidate Trump’s denigrating references to Mexican nationals as rapists who are bringing drugs . . . [and] crime (2015) and explicit contrasts in his assessment of the worth of Latinx versus, say, Scandinavian migrants. Whether the current broader public articulation of such ideas is the result of the consumption of the inflammatory rhetoric or the manifestation of latent sentiments that couldn’t be as openly shared in a more PC-conscious landscape, fear and hate-based discourse has, not surprisingly, undergirded specific immigration policies and practices. Nevertheless, this practice is not unique to the Trump administration, and various historians have addressed the unique ways that racialized conceptualizations of illegality have impacted Latinx families of migration since the late eighteenth century.

The public outcry and, in many cases, outrage that ensued in the wake of the circulation of images and stories of forced separation and immigrants’ lack of due process within this last year is a timely reminder of the power of storytelling, one which US-based Latina authors have harnessed for decades. Whether the compelling stories be testimonies or fictionalized accounts of the trials and injustices endured by migrants, narrative portraits of individuals driven by desperation to cross the US-Mexico border are an effective means by which the US public may come to better understand the circumstances surrounding migration in order to view these human beings and their families as exactly that: human. In operating as a counter-discourse to criminalizing and stigmatizing representation of immigrants, Latina¹ texts have underscored the socioeconomic and psychological consequences of global market forces upon families as well as the violation of their basic human rights under US immigration policies, thereby functioning as oppositional representations to dominant views of immigration shaped by both global markets and the state.

More significantly, the Latina works that constitute the focus of this book are among the first to document more specifically the affront to immigrants’ humanity vis-à-vis the constellation of interconnected layers or nodes of violence and trauma that have historically impacted women and children of migration before, during, and after the migratory journey. Engaging in the highly polemical social and political debate regarding undocumented immigration from the unique lens of literary analysis, Ripped Apart introduces readers to this growing body of Latina migrant narratives that capture the intersecting nodes of physical, psychological, sociocultural, and legal / structural violence. Readers will thus find a relatively extensive inclusion of summaries of relevant little-known works from the 1980s onward that portray the personal impact of the sociocultural phenomenon of the transnational² movement, as well as an explanation of the broader historical and legal contexts of the US-Mexico borderlands and transnational motherhood to more explicitly orient them to the manner in which Latina authors have utilized a variety of specific techniques in detailing the layers of trauma that are directly related to evolving US foreign policy (and political, economic, and military interventions) and immigration policies and practices as a means to constitute a more accurate or complete conceptualization of contemporary immigration and history and its impact on the individual.

Much as Chicana writers began to embrace the Chicana woman and her intersectional multiple voicings as theoretical subject in the 1980s (N. Alarcón 1991, 38), contemporary Latina writers have shifted the focus to the migrant, namely the female migrant and the juvenile migrant, as the theoretical subjects of the new millennium through detailed depictions of their experiences and an emphasis on their qualities as human beings by turning public focus regarding immigration inward—within the confines of the home and the family. In doing so, this emerging corpus of texts promotes a shift from public consciousness, or awareness, of immigration to public conscience or conscientiousness, and exemplifies an interlocking of literature and social justice with migrant narratives as resistance literature (Harlow 1987). To delve into this notion of literature as resistance more deeply, Ripped Apart also incorporates a focus on empathy theory and cognitive approaches to literature and social justice, exploring how and why various genres of Latina narratives of migration (fiction and nonfiction alike) may be more effective than research studies or a historical overview in exposing readers to the atrocities related to the racialization of immigration and the policing of the Other. As such, these Latina texts function as powerful tools that exemplify Dominick LaCapra’s conceptualization of empathic unsettlement (2001, 41) and may ultimately prompt readers to engage in meaningful pro-social behaviors and actions, especially in the cases of texts geared toward juvenile audiences.

For the purposes of thematic organization, the chapters that follow begin with an overview of the constellation of overlapping nodes of the legal / structural, sociocultural, physical, and psychological violence that Latinx families of migration endure, drawing on theories of violence and trauma developed by Cathy Caruth, Dominick LaCapra, and Nicole M. Guidotti-Hernández, and offering an overview of trends within the field of trauma studies and the debate regarding the representability of trauma. Delineating broader historical and legal contexts that map on to legal / structural and sociocultural violence, the first chapter describes the creation of illegality, the racialization of immigration, and the policing of the nonwhite Other. More specifically, I address the history of forcible separation of families as a result of immigration law, policies, and practices of policing, as connected to the manipulation of discourse and threat narratives about Latinxs and the economy, criminality, and Americanness. This chapter also explores historical patterns of gendered immigration and the migration of unaccompanied minors, as well as the associated physical, psychological, and social vulnerabilities that the migration of women and youth entail.

Each subsequent chapter will elaborate upon the specific strategies that Latina authors implement to direct attention to the four intersecting nodes of violence and how these techniques foster reader empathy. Thus, the first chapter also introduces some basic concepts of Suzanne Keen’s narrative empathy theory and elements of Mark Bracher’s schema criticism to establish a foundation for deeper discussions throughout Ripped Apart of specific narrative techniques that contribute to the development of bounded strategic empathy, ambassadorial strategic empathy, and broadcast strategic empathy, as well as how these techniques may be particularly effective because of their potential for counteracting negative mental schemas and biased information processing through readers’ systematic exposure to more adequate exemplars and prototypes that direct attention to characters’ situatedness and malleability, the internal heterogeneity of marginalized groups, and the underlying solidarity or universality of human experience across social groups (Bracher 2013). In addition to exploring aspects of character identification (e.g., naming, relative flatness or roundness, attributed speech, actions, and representation of consciousness) in the close analysis of the texts, I address narrative situation (e.g., point of view, perspective, the implicit location of the narrator with respect to other characters, and free indirect discourse). Moreover, I examine other factors that may affect empathetic responses in readers like metanarrative commentary, nested narrative levels, polyphony, repetitions, pace, order of plot events, and genre expectations.

Given the unique attributes of genres, Ripped Apart will undertake separate analyses of various examples of Latina literary production (novels, young adult novels, short stories, ethnographies, memoirs, theatrical works, and children’s literature) that document the ways in which families of Latinx migration have historically been subject to a web of interconnected nodes of violence. Regardless of genre, Keen’s and Bracher’s respective ideas about narrative strategies to develop empathy and to retool faulty schemas related to autonomy, essentialism, atomism, and homogeneity are aptly suited to inform an analysis of how Latina texts are effective instruments to combat erroneous conceptualizations regarding migrant families and their experiences and potentially lead to extratextual (i.e., real-life) efforts to change policies and systems. Simultaneously, LaCapra’s notion of empathetic unsettlement is particularly useful in understanding the power of texts to unsettle their readers to the degree that they experience a mediated reaction or response yet maintain textual or narrative distance and thereby avoid overidentification with characters and potential appropriation of the trauma.

Chapter 2 discusses four young adult novels that expose readers to specific historical moments—namely the Mexican Revolution and the repatriation of Mexicans and Mexican Americans in the 1930s—and the profound impacts of displacement and family separations on the young characters. Published in the 1980s, Irene Beltrán Hernández’s Across the Great River is a precursor to post-millennial works addressing issues of violence, immigration, and the family like Pam Muñoz Ryan’s Esperanza Rising and Guadalupe García McCall’s Shame the Stars and All the Stars Denied. These examples of Latina (and, more specifically, Chicana³) Bildungsroman present works of cultural resistance that interrogate both dominant notions of US-Mexico relations in the borderlands and patriarchal ideas and traditions within Mexican and Chicanx culture. This chapter thus analyzes how the texts document the various types of violence inflicted on Mexicans in the US in the context of the Mexican Revolution and the Great Depression as well as the triple oppression based on race, class, and gender that the female protagonists experience. Chapter 3 then directs attention to texts pertaining to Central American migration, namely Graciela Limón’s In Search of Bernabé and The River Flows North, both of which condemn the violent ramifications of US political and economic intervention in Central America and its collateral damage on families. In conjunction with the short story The Cariboo Café by Helena María Viramontes, these works articulate the layers of personal trauma associated with overarching contexts of economic and sociopolitical instability in the region during the 1970s and ’80s and exemplify Chicana texts that reflect the pan-ethnic solidarity of the Sanctuary Movement.

Chapter 4 focuses on similar themes of compounded layers of violence in fictional representations, in a more contemporary context, of the experiences of unaccompanied minors who seek opportunity, safety, and emotional fulfillment by crossing the border illegally. I explore divergences in youths’ motivations for border crossing—whether rooted in a search for answers, unified families, or an escape from imminent death—in Reyna Grande’s Across a Hundred Mountains, Ann Jaramillo’s La Línea,⁴ and Alexandra Diaz’s The Only Road, and discuss how juvenile migrants present a paradox vis-à-vis their agency and the US legal system’s simultaneous presumption of their vulnerability and/or criminality. In addition to analyzing the incorporation of the impacts of NAFTA and policies that led to the proliferation of violent gangs in Mexico and Central America, I establish a link between the depiction of characters’ experiences with a variety of traumas and violence with psychological studies of migrant adolescents who struggle with adapting to evolving roles and familial configurations as a result of the inversion of typical mother-child relationships, family reunification after prolonged separation, and continued exposure to trauma in these examples of the Bildungsroman.

Chapter 5 continues the exploration of the relationship between intimate experiences and broader social, political, and cultural contexts of violence with a focus on motherhood, maternity, and migration in Latina novels. Through exposing the individual price of globalization and migration—namely the violence, exploitation, suffering, and injustice endured by migrants and their families—writers like Ana Castillo, Julia Álvarez, and Melinda Palacio cultivate transnational alliances in the fight for human rights while also invoking questions of amorphous identity, based on race, class, gender, and nationality. Due to the striking thematic parallels, I incorporate an analysis of Josefina López’s play Detained in the Desert in this chapter, also explaining the unique features of theatrical works and genre-specific critique. As a whole, the texts examined in this chapter represent varied individual physical, emotional, and legal realities of border-crossing experiences and family separations and overtly interrogate and critique the hypocrisy of US immigration policy and practices and the dominant culture’s indifference to the marginal position of migrants, much more so than the works discussed in the earlier chapters. The Guardians and Return to Sender focus on legal / structural, sociocultural, physical, and psychological violence in the wake of Operation Gatekeeper and Operation Return to Sender respectively. Alternatively, Ocotillo Dreams and Detained in the Desert reveal and contest the violence inherent in the policies and practices related to Arizona SB 1070 and racial profiling.

Chapter 6 shifts the focus to nonfiction, including Alicia Alarcón’s collection of testimonials La Migra me hizo los mandados, Sonia Nazario’s ethnographic text Enrique’s Journey: The Story of a Boy’s Dangerous Odyssey to Reunite with His Mother, and Diane Guerrero’s memoir, In the Country We Love: My Family Divided, written with Michelle Burford. Each of these examples of life-writing reveals the profound personal impact of the varying types of violence that transnational and familial separation inflicts on women and children, during the migrant journey itself, when children are left behind in their country of origin by migrating parents, and when children remain in the US after parents’ detention and deportation. Chapter 7 expands the scope to include analysis of recent children’s (picture) books by Latinx⁵ authors that similarly reveal the far-reaching consequences of the various layers of violence with which Latinx families of migration contend. Like texts geared toward adults, books written by Latinxs for small children and early readers bring the focus back to la familia and invoke consideration of what it means to be Latinx in the US, notions of cultural diversity within and beyond borders, and the importance of transfrontera alliances to combat and overcome layers of violence, thereby teaching empathy, cultural coalitions, and social change to the next generation.

The final chapter more broadly unites the contents of the previous chapters within the frameworks of empathy and literature for social justice, underlining the power of storytelling to counteract the manipulation of discourse through interrogation of dominant versions of history and identifying storytelling’s role in enacting change in attitudes and behaviors. The Latina narratives of transnational migration included in Ripped Apart expose the exponential impact of the interconnected nodes of legal / structural, sociocultural, physical, and psychological violence of immigration policies and practices and, as such, function didactically to rectify distortions and omissions in the traditional K–12 curriculum and beyond. Via strategic use of a variety of techniques, Latina authors restore the humanity of individuals affected by transnational migration, emphasizing the interplay of the personal and the political, and both unsettling and compelling readers to become more informed and better equipped to engage with polemic issues of immigration and the family in their own communities.

Chapter 1:

Historia(s) of Borderlands Violence: Telling the Tales of Historical and Contemporary Violence

The Power of Stories to Expose Violent Truths of History

If every age has its symptoms, ours appears to be the age of trauma, Nancy K. Miller and Jason Tougaw (2002, 1) aver, describing the twentieth century literary [turn] to narratives that record for public consumption the personal strain on the body and the mind produced by certain kinds of extreme suffering, from the annihilatory technologies of the Holocaust to the devastation of AIDS (2), and American culture’s apparent penchant for traumatic accounts. In a culture of trauma, they contend, accounts of extreme situations sell books (2). This may explain, at least in part, the evident recent interest of independent and mainstream publishers alike in the proliferation and diversification of fiction and nonfiction that address the harrowing experiences of Mexican and Central American immigration. Whether they examine the circumstances compelling individuals or entire families to leave their homelands, the trials faced during and after the journey north, or the aftermath of separation due to detention or deportation, such narratives ultimately attempt to represent the unrepresentable or articulate the unspeakable violence (Guidotti-Hernández 2011; Morrison 1989). How, one might ask, can they accomplish this given the very limits of language and, moreover, do so in a way that engages, rather than alienates, a broad readership?

In the early 1990s, scholars like Cathy Caruth had already begun to undertake an interdisciplinary analysis of the nature of trauma, memory, identity, and representation, applying psychoanalytic and post-structuralist theories to literary studies. Although the contemporary contexts of individual and cultural trauma faced by Latinx families of migration undoubtedly diverge from those of victims of, for example, the Holocaust or the Rwandan genocide, the frameworks that historians and trauma scholars have proposed to understand trauma and its aftermath are useful in considering the nature of the violence and trauma associated with immigration and the Latinx experience in the United States from the mid-nineteenth century onward and the portrayal of such trauma in recent narratives of migration, as Marta Caminero-Santangelo (2016) has described. How and why are such texts effective means for exposing the historic deployment of violence in the borderlands? It is critical both to clarify the nature of the relationship between traumatic experience and representation and to define empathy in a literary sense before exploring the capacities (and limits) of specific narrative techniques to develop empathetic responses and perhaps enhance the potential for extratextual action from readers.

Based upon Freudian notions of fragmentation and repression of traumatic events and Lacanian repetition, Caruth’s conceptualization of individual trauma posits the impossibility of locating or identifying a specific traumatic event, its impossible assimilation or understanding, and the return of elements surrounding such that continue to haunt the survivor later. The memory of trauma, the story of a wound that cries out, that addresses us in the attempt to tell us of a reality or truth that is not otherwise available (Caruth 1996, 4), emerges later in flashbacks and nightmares and defies understanding and therefore representation. Instead of possessing the traumatic event as something to ‘claim,’ to narrativize and interpret—to work through—the Caruthian trauma victim is possessed by the trauma, which continues to haunt her in a vividness beyond comprehension, Emy Koopman notes (2010, 238). Taking a cue from post-structuralism, Caruth points to the incomprehensibility of trauma as well as the impossibility of its accurate artistic or textual representation. Yet, the enterprise of writing trauma is not a lost cause. In fact, LaCapra claims, the literary (or even art in general) is a prime, if not the privileged, place for giving voice to trauma (2001, 190), and its artistic representation is critical, but should begin from the stance of not knowing (Caruth 1996, 9), rooted in the ‘gap’ or aporia, by language that defies referentiality (Koopman 2010, 236).

To be sure, occurrences of trauma are uniquely individualized and difficult to categorize, and scholars like Stef Craps and Gert Buelens note the importance of expand[ing] our understanding of trauma from sudden, unexpected catastrophic events to encompass the chronic psychic suffering produced by the structural violence of racial, gender, sexual, class, and other inequities (2008, 3). This shift to consider overarching societal structures’ contributions to ongoing stress—or insidious trauma (Root 1992, 240–41)—is appropriate in the case of individuals and the broader collectivity and is instrumental in understanding trauma as collective and chronic, particularly in the case of Latinx families affected by immigration. As Caminero-Santangelo rightly observes, "The move to conceptualize pervasive sociohistorical conditions, as well as events, as potentially traumatic constitutes a significant addition to trauma studies, with direct and obvious implications for an understanding of US Latino/a and Latin American communities impacted by