Latin American Languages and Societies Commons^™

Carlos y Filiberto, protagonists of Carlos Fuentes’ short stories “La muñeca reina” and “Chac Mool” are the prototypical existential characters of Latin American literature from the 1950’s.  Much like the main character from Juan Carlos Onetti’s “Un sueño realizado,” they are solitary and anguished men unable to act because of their constant questioning and reflecting.   They also strive to find an illusory and nostalgic past in a failed attempt to attain redemption, and their search is guided with Jungian psychological models: their repressed inner selfs, their animas, are never able to surface or create unified and fully realized individuals.

The memoir is a creative space of reflection that superimposes personal memory upon historical and national remembering. It is a literary genre that forces us to meditate on the function of amnesia and remembrance in the way we construct the narratives of our lives. An increasing number of Latino/a memoirs call our attention to the growing and vastly diverse Latin American communities in the United States. In particular, two recent memoirs by Latino writers, John Phillip Santos and Ilan Stavans, reveal how culture, religion, and society shape memory. Santos's Places Left Unfinished at the Time of Creation (1999) seeks memory through …