Depictions of Law in Contemporary Latinx Literature: A Literary Theoretical Analysis of the Works of Sergio De La Pava and Mauro Javier Cárdenas
Academic discourse around depictions of the law and legal proceedings is a field that only widens when applying research of how different cultures in the United States must navigate being accused of a crime, arrested, incarcerated, or threatened with deportation. When a real-world or narrative perspective focuses its view on criminal defendants, every case can be its own case study via an individual’s unique situation and how it is shaped by and often representative of the culture that they belong to. A Naked Singularity by Sergio De La Pava and Aphasia by Mauro Javier Cárdenas are novels written by Latinx authors that explore the tensions between a plethora of marginalized cultures and the United States criminal justice system. I am most interested in examining these tensions using the lens crafted by scholarly research around the testimonio. The cultural revolution of the testimonio that broke the silent suffering of many Latin American countries created a wake of writing genres that eventually could be accurately applied to Latinx authors living in or writing about lived experiences of the marginalized and subaltern in the United States. Testimonio also creates a unique opportunity when researchers are allowed to validate its parallels to those that seek to tell their truth outside of Latin America. When the testimonio as truth spoken by the disenfranchised is muzzled, rewritten, or silenced by expectations of courtroom legal testimony, analyzing fictional depictions of the aftermath by culturally aware authors can reveal a new layer of contemporary Latinx literature that has been largely unstudied.
Literature, Law, Latin American literature, Contemporary, Latinx, Testimonio, Testimony
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