Latin American Literature Commons^™

The Boo Of Viramontes’S Cafe: Retelling Ghost Stories, Central American Representing Social Death, Karina Oliva Alvarado

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Chicana author Helena María Viramontes’s culturally complex “The Cariboo Cafe,” renders a contemporaneous example of social death in the lives of undocumented migrants. Sociologist Orlando Patterson bases “social death” on the “profound natal alienation of the slave” (38) that once cut off from a past and future, promulgates the slave’s desocialization and depersonalization: systems also at play with undocumented Central American immigrants. While Patterson refers to an overt and systemized economic exploitation of a people, the concept remains relevant to this analysis, though symbolic. It examines a three-fold negation through the representational experiences of undocumented immigration, gender, and what Arturo …