You’re both American and Guatemalan, yet most Americans don’t know much about Guatemala. In your experience, is this a particular blind spot, or part of a more general kind of tunnel vision practiced in the U.S.? Do you think it’s changing?
It’s hard to generalize for all Americans or all of the U.S., but I do think that over the last half-century it has become possible for Americans to be less informed about the rest of the world. Very few countries can afford to know as little about other countries as the U.S. does. In reality the U.S. can’t afford it either, but despite the high cost it’s been doing so. This isn’t a national trait, it’s just an alternative people have had because of how the U.S. acts in the world. There have always been Americans who seek to both understand and connect themselves with people beyond their national boundaries, and I hope a collective concern about ‘tunnel vision,’ is making this group larger.
As for Guatemala in particular, I think there was a long period – roughly mid 1950s to early 1990s – when it was particularly difficult for Americans to really know about Guatemala. In 1954 the CIA and the Eisenhower administration orchestrated a coup to overthrow Jacobo Arbenz, Guatemala’s democratically-elected president. At the time, the U.S. worried that Arbenz’s reforms – particularly his redistributive land reforms – were communist. From 1954 to the 1980s, military dictators backed by the U.S. ruled Guatemala, and the various resistance movements that were effectively crushed in the 1960s and 1970s became, in the 1980s, a full-scale guerilla movement. Though government support for the Guatemalan military dictators varied over the decades, there is no doubt that the U.S. supplied funds, arms, and training, and this doubtlessly made it hard for Americans to get complete information about what was going on in Guatemala.
Since the 1990s, and in particular after 1996 peace accords, it has arguably been somewhat easier to learn about Guatemala’s recent history. The truth commission established in 1994 through the Accord of Oslo published a report that relied principally on first-person accounts of the armed conflict. Some of their findings are available (in English here). The Catholic Church in Guatemala was simultaneously working on a similar investigation and their report is available here. There are also some excellent books on the earlier history – the Arbenz era and the U.S. intervention – such as Piero Gliejeses’s Shattered Hope. Without minimizing in the least the dedicated involvement of many Americans in Guatemala, I think the U.S. could only benefit from having more Americans informed and interested in Guatemala’s history. They will doubtlessly see in Guatemala’s history some indirect but still suggestive parallels with our current foreign policy. And, I hope, they will also see a history that is fascinating on its own terms, quite apart from the story of American intervention.
How did your experience and your family’s experiences in Guatemala influence you in the writing of the novel?
I think for a lot of fiction writers novels are a kind of collage and embellishment of personal experiences, stories heard or observed, and things invented. The personal experience that most informs this book is the condition of being transnational – of being both of and in more than one culture. It seems to me there are more and more people – in the U.S. and elsewhere – who self-identify this way. In my view this has quite an impact on how one experiences foreignness, and I’ve tried to bring that out in the narrator’s way of confronting the world.
My mother’s family in Guatemala is urban, rather than rural, so the communities Nítido, the narrator, moves in are less family portraits than they are places invented out of conversations and experiences in Guatemala. But there is no doubt that the personal stories of family members have supplied much of the energy if not the details of this story. In particular, hearing all my life about one of my uncles, who was part of the Arbenz government and then the early resistance movement, has always motivated me to learn and write about the armed conflict. Because he was killed in 1972 I never met him, but even without doing so I’ve seen the impact his life and ideas had on others.
You’re an academic, studying for a PhD in Latin American history at UC-Berkeley, and you’re also, obviously, a fiction writer. How do these two pursuits complement and influence each other? How do they conflict? Do you feel like it requires you to have two different identities?
In a way it does require some internal splitting! But I’ve found that in fact the two kinds of work complement each other well. I used to study twentieth-century history of Guatemala, and that actually proved too close for comfort. Likewise, I felt studying literature intruded too much on the fiction sphere. Now I study colonial Latin American history and it gives the fiction-writing just enough distance. The two kinds of writing are very different, so switching from one to the other is pretty refreshing. And since there’s very little overlap of content, the main contribution one area makes to the other is conceptual. For example, I find that fiction-writing has helped me tremendously in thinking about the methodology of history-writing. And, in turn, I’ve found that working on history has helped me think about the relationship between fiction and presumed fact. This last area is such a tangle that I’m sure it will be a source of life-long interest.
Nítido is a curious narrator because he’s so clearly a flawed, if mostly well-intentioned person, and because he lives so much in his own head. Yet he functions as the mediator between American and Guatemalan culture and ways of life for the reader. Is he at all like you? Do you feel as though you are functioning as a mediator between American and Guatemalan culture by publishing this novel?
I hope I’m not too much like Nítido – maybe I have some of his flaws without knowing it! But as I mentioned before, his position as a transnational narrator is certainly informed by my experiences. At a more strategic level, I did want to have a narrator who would be able to credibly operate in Guatemalan society and at the same time be able to see it from the outside. ‘Mediator’ is an interesting word; it makes him (and me) sound like active negotiators, which I think is only partially true. It’s not flattering to cast yourself as a passive subject, but I think our collective ambition to be protagonists blinds us to how much circumstances act upon us. In portraying Nítido I tried to illustrate how this occurs.
As for mediating by publishing, I do hope that this book will draw American readers into Guatemala. But I hope it will also speak to an American audience about the changing nature of American identity. Without denying the very real disparities between Guatemala and the U.S., I would hope that some readers might come to see in the identity ‘American’ something like ‘of the Americas.’
Your novel takes place in 1993, when people whose lives had been torn apart by violence were still very unsettled. What are things like now in Guatemala? What is the political situation?
From my point of view things continue to be very unsettled. The present turmoil seems to manifest itself economically – in the form of financial crises and endemic crime – but I think most people agree that this situation is inextricable from the instability engendered by the armed conflict. I also think that in many essential ways, the silence described in the novel continues to have a hold on many households and towns. In terms of politics, my feeling is that there is a great deal of disillusionment with the political process among Guatemalans. Corruption and the government’s consistent failure to change course continually dishearten all but the most optimistic. It’s also true that many of the progressive leaders who might have provided political alternatives were effectively exiled, silenced, or killed over the last several decades. Nevertheless, the country is not without other political alternatives. As a member of the ranks of striving optimists, I hope the next few years will bring about positive changes.
