Time Travel in the Latin American and Caribbean Imagination

Time Travel in the Latin American and

Caribbean Imagination

Re-reading History

Rudyard J. Alcocer

TIME TRAVEL IN THE LATIN AMERICAN AND CARIBBEAN IMAGINATION

Copyright © Rudyard J. Alcocer, 2011.

All rights reserved.

First published in 2011 byPALGRAVE MACMILLAN®in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC,175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Alcocer, Rudyard J. Time travel in the Latin American and Caribbean imagination :

re-reading history / Rudyard J. Alcocer. p. cm. 1. Latin American literature—History and criticism. 2. Caribbean

fiction—History and criticism. 3. Time travel in literature. 4. Time perception in literature. I. Title.

PQ7081.A528 2011860.8�15—dc22 2011010534

A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library.

Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India.

First edition: September 2011

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

ISBN 978-1-349-29810-5 ISBN 978-0-230-33778-7 (eBook)

DOI 10.1057/9780230337787

Dedicated to my beloved mother, Isabel Cessa de Alcocer; to my cherished wife, Jeanine; and to our wonderful children,

Carmen and Joel. Past, present, and future.

Contents

Acknowledgments ix

Prologue: Time Out of Joint xi

Introduction: Time and Narrative in the Americas 1

1 Continuing Encounters: Journeys to (and From) the “Discovery” and Conquest of the Americas 23

2 On Island Time? Temporal Displacement and the Caribbean 67

3 The Ghost of La Malinche: Time Travel and Feminism 113

4 Not Just Kids’ Stuff: Time Travel as Pedagogy in the Americas 151

Afterword: Time Travel Fact and Fiction 187

Notes 199

Bibliography 215

Index 233

Acknowledgments

T ime Travel in the Latin American and Caribbean Imagination could never have come to fruition without the generous input, editorial assistance, and friendly encouragement of many

people. These include my students and colleagues at Georgia State University. Among the latter, Héctor Fernández L’Hoeste, Fernando Reati, Germán Torres, Bill Nichols, Leslie Marsh, Elena del Río Parra, Tim Jansa, Deb Loden, Melissa Skye, and Patricia Coloma have been particularly helpful. Colleagues at other institutions have also lent their support: Michael Janis of Morehouse College provided invalu-able feedback on early drafts of the study, as did Kimberle López of the University of New Mexico.

I would also like to thank Georgia State University’s College of Arts and Sciences and its Center for Latin American and Latino Studies for their generous summer research stipends and travel grants, as well as the university’s Interlibrary Loan Office, which on every occasion has procured even the most obscure of texts. I am also deeply grateful to the expert editorial team at Palgrave Macmillan and to the anony-mous reviewers they enlisted.

On a more personal note, I would like to thank the following peo-ple for their ongoing friendship and support: Randal Affolder, Ben and Vickie Kelley, Rich and Penny Leake, John Erstling, Jim and Eunice Veeder, Adriana Méndez Rodenas, Thomas P. Carney, Kristi Gregory, James Pfuntner, Patricia Altavena, Juan Carlos Galeano, David Thompson, Miguel López Lozano, Juan José Daneri, Jennifer Valko, Richard Tschiderer, and my brothers and sisters (particularly my brother Kelly, who read through an early version of the study and

x ● Acknowledgments

made countless helpful comments). The warmest thank-you goes to Jeanine Alcocer, whose love, encouragement, and organizational skills know no bounds.

Sections of chapter 3 appeared in slightly modified form as “The Ghosts of La Malinche: Trees and Treason in Gioconda Belli’s La mujer habitada.” ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment (Oxford University Press). doi: 10.1093/isle/isq118 (November 2010); pp. 1–19. I express gratitude to ISLE for kindly granting me permission to reuse this material.

PROLOGUE

Time Out of Joint

No sé hasta que punto los jóvenes latinoamericanos de hoy se complacen en el estudio sistemático, científico, de su propia historia. Es probable que la estudien muy bien y sepan sacar fecundas enseñanzas de un pasado mucho más presente de lo que suele creerse, en este continente, donde ciertos hechos lamentables suelen repetirse, más al norte, más al sur, con cíclica insistencia.

Alejo Carpentier, “Conciencia e identidad de América,” 1975

[I don’t know to what extent today’s Latin American youth take pleasure in the systematic, scientific study of their own history. It is probable that they study it very well and that they are able to draw fertile lessons from a past that is much more present than commonly thought, on this continent, where certain unfortunate events tend to repeat themselves, in the North and in the South, with cyclical insistence.] Who controls the past . . . controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.

George Orwell, 1984, 1949

What’s past is prologueWilliam Shakespeare, The Tempest, 1610

xii ● Prologue

What if you could travel back in time several centuries to pivotal moments in the history of the Americas? The Conquest, for instance. What if, furthermore, you could

intervene in these moments? What would you do and why? What if you could prevent the advent of the slave trade? Conversely, what if people from those long-past moments visited our epoch? Why would they come to us and what would they tell us? In recent fictions from and about Latin America and the Caribbean, such encounters describe a trend.

* * *

Flashback: April 29, 2009. On this day, President Barack Obama held a press conference that addressed his first one hundred days in office. One of the urgent topics of discussion was the so-called swine flu, or H1N1, a deadly disease that had apparently originated in Mexico. James C. McKinley, Jr., of the New York Times, reported the follow-ing day on the first fatality from the disease in the United States: a little boy who had traveled with his family from Mexico. Another boy, McKinley wrote, “was listed in critical condition at a San Antonio hospital, suffering from swine flu, the potentially deadly form of influ-enza that began in Mexico City . . . ” (McKinley, see bibliography).

The debate soon arose regarding whether or not to keep the Mexico/US border open. Obama and his secretary of Homeland Security, Janet Napolitano, were of one mind: keep it open. The latter explained that closing the border “would be a very, very heavy cost for what epidemi-ologists tell us would be marginal benefit” (McNeil). Obama, simi-larly, told a reporter that closing the border would be “akin to closing the barn door after the horse is out” (McNeil). Nonetheless, the presi-dent urged caution: “Wash your hands when you shake hands, cover your mouth when you cough . . . If you are feeling certain flu symp-toms, don’t get on an airplane” (Grady).

Although Mexico City has made positive strides in recent years in the fight against environmental degradation, reports that a potential global pandemic originated in this city seemed to surprise very few in the United States and instead triggered knee-jerk reactions about travel across the Mexico/US border, alongside the corresponding threat of viral infections working their way north.

Prologue ● xiii

In fact, Mexico City has been a source of concern not only for North Americans, but for Mexicans as well. The poet and novelist Homero Aridjis, for example, decried the environmental conditions of Mexico City as early as 1993 in his La leyenda de los soles (The Legend of the Suns). The solution the novel proposes to the city’s problems is telling in its relative lack of pragmatism: in Aridjis’s novel the fate of Mexico City does not depend on new vaccines, government poli-cies, or global political relations. It depends, instead, on the outcome of a battle between pre-Columbian “immortals.” These time travel-ers have reappeared in contemporary Mexico City to settle a conflict initiated more than five centuries ago. The present study is about these and other fictional time travelers in Latin America and the Caribbean. While often I found myself rooting for these characters in their assorted missions, I also saw the need to analyze their actions in all their implications. As such, Time Travel in the Latin American and Caribbean Imagination is premised on the notion that an investiga-tion into time travel provides meaningful new perspectives on several issues of ongoing hemispheric importance.

Time and how we understand it are crucial in both Aridjis’s novel and in the H1N1 threat. With the latter, people were particularly fearful of the possibility that at any given moment flu symptoms could arise that had taken weeks or even months to germinate. Once the first few cases of the virus were confirmed both in Mexico and beyond its borders, the global hysteria spread like wildfire: instanta-neously, almost, on account of modern communications systems. In the case of La leyenda de los soles, “time” is also at work: the immortals traverse the centuries only to surface in a Mexico City that is at once pre- and postmodern, both provincial and global. Ultimately, how-ever, Aridjis’s novel is symptomatic of the widely held notion that the issues currently facing not just Mexico but the Americas as a whole—issues that include but that are not limited to the heritage of conquest (to borrow an expression by Sol Tax) and the legacy of slavery—are unfinished business from the past, not unlike the ghost who visits Shakespeare’s Hamlet.

It is not just the past, however, that sends emissaries to the present, whether in the form of science fictional time travelers, immortals, extraordinarily old people and creatures, or through reincarnations. Time travel can occur in the opposite direction, that is, fictional

xiv ● Prologue

characters from the present and, indeed, the future, also travel to the past. This is the case, for example, in Orson Scott Card’s Pastwatch (1996), in which scientists from the twenty-second century seek to intervene in Columbus’s voyage to keep the “discovery” of America from happening. In Time Travel, I argue that this dream of making a surgical intervention in the hemisphere’s past in order to redirect its history is alive and well, whether the author be Mexican, North American, Caribbean, and so on.

Similarly, the dream or desire for contact between past and present can be expressed in a variety of artistic media, including narrative, poetry, drama, painting, and film. Indeed, the texts featured in Time Travel take one step further George Orwell’s well-known axiom about controlling time: what better way to control the past, for example, than to travel to it and change it? This question leads to many oth-ers, all of which are addressed in this study: why the interest in the past among recent cultural production from or about the Americas, particularly a past that involves the initial encounters between indig-enous Americans and outsiders? Can time travel—a phenomenon often associated with escapism and “relegated” to the realm of sci-ence fiction—have any bearing on crucial, real-life hemispheric issues involving expressions of cultural identity? Ultimately, what is the rela-tionship between unlikely—if not impossible—fictional events and the prospects for real, practical changes in the nonfictional world? Time travel, perhaps better than any other kind of fictional device, underscores the tension between what happened and what could have happened, between what went wrong in the past and how it could be made right. If, that is, it could be made right: my contention in this study is that fictional time travel within Latin American and Caribbean contexts is motivated largely because of a lack or a per-ceived lack of practical, political agency in the present day. Fictional time travel is, in many instances, the final recourse of those seeking radical change, including several of the literary characters I describe in the pages ahead.

Given its focus on time travel in fiction from and about the Americas, this study is the setting for a number of unexpected encoun-ters: between different time periods, obviously, but also between what might otherwise be considered disparate disciplines and dis-courses, including Latin American and Caribbean literature and

Prologue ● xv

philosophy, science fiction, history, narrative theory, psychoanalysis, feminism, ecocriticism, and several others. In addition, Time Travel brings a variety of writers, artists, and historical figures from differ-ent regions and different generations into unexpected dialogues, even when their viewpoints seem either unrelated or opposed: the Cuban poets Nancy Morejón and José Martí, the Mexican poet Octavio Paz, the Italian writer Umberto Eco, the Colombian filmmaker Jorge Alí Triana, the Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung, the Mexica/Aztec emperor Moctezuma, and the Mexican painter Frida Kahlo—to name just a few—all contribute (whether directly or indirectly, willingly or inadvertently) valuable insights in the pages ahead. In the midst of this interdisciplinarity and heterogeneity, the focus throughout this study is on the extraordinary, imaginary temporal journeys that have occurred in recent cultural production from or about the Americas.

* * *

Citations of texts written in Spanish are given first in Spanish, fol-lowed by the English translation. However, this order is inverted when I integrate the English translation into the prose of the manuscript. I use published translations when available. Otherwise, translations are my own.

I capitalize the word “conquest” when referring to the specific series of events that led to the dominance of Spaniards over indig-enous American groups. This is so particularly when the word is pre-ceded by the definitive article (“the Conquest”) and is not followed by any modifiers. When using the term in a broader, more generalized way, I use the lowercase. I do so, as well, when the term is followed by modifiers (“the conquest of Mexico”).

Although the term generally encompasses a much larger area, I occasionally employ “the Americas” in this study. The term, unless otherwise specified, is shorthand for Latin America and the Caribbean. Similarly, “American” refers to the same geographical grouping. Finally, although “Taíno” is often spelled without the accent in English usage, I maintain this accent except when quoting others.

Atlanta, GeorgiaMay 2011

INTRODUCTION

Time and Narrative in the Americas

All memory is presentNovalis, Poeticismen 1798

Vi la posibilidad de establecer ciertos sincronismos posibles, americanos, recurrentes, por encima del tiempo, relacionando esto con aquello, el ayer con el presente.

Alejo Carpentier, “De lo real maravilloso americano,” 1949

[I saw the possibility of establishing certain possible synchro-nisms: American, recurring, beyond time, relating this with that, yesterday with the present.]

Spanish American, Caribbean, and North American fiction; Hollywood films; Mexican paintings; board games; children’s literature: all in one study? How is this possible? The short

answer is that it is possible: as possible, in fact, as a fictional voyage across time. The long answer lies in the pages ahead. Read on . . . the answer is of no small importance.

* * *

My purposes in writing Time Travel in the Latin American and Caribbean Imagination are on the one hand to trace occurrences of

2 ● Time Travel in Latin American and Caribbean Imagination

time travel involving figures from literary writings and other cul-tural production that treat the European arrival and colonization of the Americas. On the other hand, my aim is also to analyze these temporal (i.e., relating to time) journeys in terms of their relevance to ongoing issues of hemispheric cultural identity. This is so partic-ularly in light of the fact that several of the texts I discuss (many of which were, perhaps not coincidentally, published within a few years of the controversial 1992 quincentennial of Christopher Columbus’s arrival in the Americas1), establish a counterpoint between past and present, broadly stated, and more particularly between the colo-nial and precolonial past of the region and its present (and some-times, too, its future). In simple language, in this study I explore why so much relatively recent cultural production from and about the Americas involves time travel. In doing so, I focus primarily on several (though by no means all) relevant texts that treat cul-tural production from Latin America and the Caribbean (mostly the Spanish-speaking areas in both cases). My argument throughout is that time travel within the context of cultural production from and about the Americas must be understood as a strategy to envi-sion a different reality by groups who might find the painful legacy of the past in the Americas otherwise insurmountable. Because I find it doubtful—given the study’s broad geographical and thematic scope—that readers will be familiar with most of the texts I analyze, I occasionally integrate—where relevant—direct textual citations in developing my argument.

In light of the ways it develops this argument, Time Travel has become—not unlike my previous study, Narrative Mutations—an interdisciplinary, comparative project. Rather than lamenting or the-orizing the decline and demise of comparative literature, Time Travel simply and, perhaps unreflexively, practices this discipline. It is, in a way, a work of comparative literature although not necessarily one about comparative literature. The results of the study will, I hope, be beneficial to comparatists of American and trans-Atlantic litera-tures, as well as to those interested in issues of identity involving Latin America and the Caribbean, not to mention readers interested in the nexuses between literatures of the Americas and time, literatures of the Americas and science, and science (or speculative) fiction more specifically stated.

Introduction ● 3

While the geographical focus of this study may be Latin America and the Caribbean, I also comment on works written in languages other than Spanish (e.g., English and Italian) and by authors from other areas who have written stories set in these two overlapping regions. For this reason, I employ the terms “the Americas” and, occasionally, “New World” as shorthand for the geographical set-tings and thematic interests of the works I discuss, regardless of either their initial language of publication or their respective authors’ nationalities. In using these terms, I am following scholars like J. Michael Dash, Gordon Brotherston, and Lúcia de Sá, all of whom have explained their functionality and limitations. For Dash, the use of the term “New World,” for example, has become “an unavoid-able compromise,” and he adds that “the only reasonable alterna-tives, American studies or American literature, would not normally include South American or Caribbean writing . . . ” (1). It should be noted, however, that in the dozen years since Dash published his study, the term “literature of the Americas” has gained currency in North American academia, and I employ it often in this study. Furthermore, as Brotherston and De Sá explain, the term “American” can also have unintended, pejorative connotations inasmuch as for them– implicitly, at least—the term “normally points back to the Old World in language and culture” (8). This is so, apparently, given the occasional misconception that anything of merit in the Americas is of European origin, as well as the fact that the former was named after a European cartographer and adventurer (Amerigo Vespucci). Along these lines, the term “New World” would seem to invoke the Old World even more and thereby, albeit unintentionally, reify the perceived dependence of the New World on the Old.

In the particular case of Time Travel one could argue that the Italian Umberto Eco (see chapter 1) is by no means a New World or “American” author. Nonetheless, the short story of his I discuss in chapter 1 is in many ways a tale of the Americas or a trans-Atlantic tale. This is so, in geographical terms at least, inasmuch as it addresses Columbus’s 1492 voyage. Conversely, in other cases my geographi-cal boundaries with regard to the Americas reveal a further limita-tion to works about Latin America and the Caribbean. For example, in Kindred (1979), a novel by Octavia Butler, a modern-day African American woman travels backward in time to the era of slavery in the

4 ● Time Travel in Latin American and Caribbean Imagination

Southern United States and in so doing meets her ancestors. Because it is a story largely about the United States, and because it registers historical and cultural contexts that are not equal (although undoubt-edly linked) to those of Latin America and the Caribbean, Kindred lies mostly2 beyond the scope of Time Travel. Similarly, although some Brazilian cultural production could very well have been included in the study (Mário de Andrade’s Macunaíma [1928] comes to mind), in the interest of brevity and in an effort not to challenge my own disciplinary and linguistic limitations, I have chosen not to include texts pertaining to Brazil in this study. While in following common parlance I refer to “Latin” America, a designation that is not without its share of ambiguities,3 it is fair to say that most of these references are to Spanish America (the Spanish-speaking portion encompassed by Latin America).

Apropos geography and “Spanish” America in particular, this study also strives to draw productive links between this region and the Caribbean. Over the last several hundred years, for instance, the Caribbean and Spanish America—due to many complex reasons involving language, geography, economics, and other differences stemming from their colonial formations—have followed divergent trajectories. Nonetheless, the Spanish-speaking Caribbean region (Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, and some coastal areas of South and Central America) occupy both worlds, and to varying degrees, other parts of the Caribbean do as well. This is all the more the case when we remember that both Spanish America and much of the Caribbean were thrust into the modern era by Spanish explor-ers and conquerors. Indeed, we shall see that time travelers from the era of “discovery” and conquest make little distinction between, for instance, Mexico City and Trinidad: both constitute, quite interest-ingly, territories familiar to them.

In some respects, Time Travel is a continuation of Narrative Mutations. In the latter study I endeavored to show how heredity functions as a guiding motif in many Caribbean writings, oftentimes manifesting itself in unlikely ways. Heredity, both as a scientific concept and as a literary trope, cannot be understood without tak-ing into consideration the ways it operates within a linear temporal framework; in other words, the offspring necessarily follows the par-ents and a mutation necessarily transforms a preexisting gene. Time

Introduction ● 5

Travel, obviously perhaps, shares this interest in temporality. Rather than analyzing mutations and other genetic transactions, however, this study is peopled with ghosts and time travelers who journey back and forth between the distant past, the present, and sometimes the future. While these travelers may be fictional characters, presences, or voices, they also invoke a broad range of disciplines, including his-tory, anthropology, psychoanalysis, and physics. Let us return to the example from the prologue: when an ageless Mexica/Aztec4 scribe sur-faces on the streets of modern Mexico City, as is the case in Homero Aridjis’s La leyenda de los soles, the event seems to require the kind of interdisciplinary explanation and analysis that the previously men-tioned fields of study can provide. Even just in terms of the various literary genres, La leyenda de los soles can be approached from multiple generic and thematic perspectives insofar as it is at once a novel that addresses environmental concerns while also employing techniques most commonly associated with science fiction or fantasy fiction.

As its title suggests, time is a unifying trope in this study: it is, at once, a study on writings and other cultural production about time and also one that examines the kinds of time portals that one might find in science fiction. There have been, undoubtedly, countless methodological and disciplinary approaches to understanding and describing all the workings of time, or at least attempting to do so. Time Travel could never fully encompass all these approaches, which began—in the Western tradition, at least—with the pre-Socratics. There are, however, some disciplines that seem particularly useful to my project. In the field of narratology, for instance, Ursula Heise’s Chronoschisms (1997) comments on a broad range of fiction writers, including Julio Cortázar and Jorge Luis Borges: two Argentinean writers who have attained “cross-over” appeal in North American academia. In doing so, she traces the links between the culture of time posited by postmodernity and changes in the structure of the novel. For his part, Peter Brooks assigns to time a central role across all narratives by arguing that the “meaning dealt with by narrative, and thus perhaps narrative’s raison d’être, is of and in time” (10). Elsewhere, Paul Ricoeur distinguishes between tales of time and tales about time. The former includes all fictional narratives “inas-much as the structural transformations that affect the situations and characters take time,” while in the latter “it is the very experience of

6 ● Time Travel in Latin American and Caribbean Imagination

time that is at stake in these structural transformations” (101). Mark Currie agrees by asserting that “time is a universal feature of narra-tive, but it is the topic of only a few” (2). Inasmuch as many of the texts I treat in this study involve time travel and similar types of tem-poral dislocation, it seems fair to say that these texts are, following Ricoeur, tales about time.

If, as mentioned previously, heredity involves a conventional lin-ear chronology, fictional time travel can break the laws of physics and the material world. Although he refers primarily to recent Latin American novels, Fernando Aínsa’s observations about time and the novel are applicable to many other works of narrative fiction and, perhaps, to other forms of artistic expression or cultural production that involve the passage of time. According to Aínsa, there is “a nov-elistic time—the historical present of the narration—in which other times coincide. The interferences can be from the past, but also from the future in the form of deliberate anachronisms” [“Hay un tiempo novelesco—presente histórico de la narración—sobre el cual inciden otros tiempos. Las interferencias pueden ser del pasado, pero también del futuro en forma de anacronías deliberadas” 96–97].

As useful as narratological concepts are to this study, they can-not in themselves provide a complete conceptual framework for gain-ing an understanding of the representation of time travel in cultural production from the Americas. One must also take into account the social and intellectual history or histories of the region. With refer-ence to how these histories are constructed in the Americas, Lois Parkinson Zamora, in The Usable Past: The Imagination of History in Recent Fiction of the Americas (1997), challenges the notion that the residents of this area

are free of the burdens of history because they are free to create their own. On the contrary, they dramatize the fact that history may be more burdensome—and more meaningful—when one must create it, a circumstance as likely in the New World as inheriting a history from a known family or community. It is when cultural traditions are disjunctive or destroyed, and the potential for historical pro-jection apparently endless, that history becomes problematic and literature instrumental. (4–5)

Introduction ● 7

Elsewhere, Rubén Dri makes a similar argument and registers a similar mood by pointing out that residents of the Americas, as they attempt to construct their histories and cultural identities,

continuously create and recreate [these histories] in order to nour-ish their hopes, encourage their battles, project their future and also console themselves in light of their unbearable situation. The master’s task is to provoke a “forgetting” in the dominated peo-ples . . . these peoples, unconsciously, respond with a counter-read-ing [of history] which is oftentimes shameful, but that in one way or another flourishes in key moments in history.

[crean y recrean continuamente para alimentar sus esperanzas, animar sus luchas, proyectar su futuro y también consolarse de lo insoportable de su situación. Es tarea del dominador el provo-car el “olvido” en los pueblos dominados . . . los pueblos, de manera inconsciente, le van oponiendo una contralectura muchas veces vergonzante, pero que de una u otra manera aflora en momentos claves de la historia.] (56)

One might ask what accounts for this “unbearable situation” Dri mentions, or the “problematic” history (and the consequent instru-mentality of literature) outlined by Zamora. In an essay published in 1989, “12 de octubre de 1492: ¿Descubrimiento o encubrim-iento?” [“October 12, 1492: Discovery or Cover-up?”], the noted Mexican philosopher Leopoldo Zea asserts that both Spain and Latin America, on account of the Conquest and a colonial period that for many centuries retarded development in the region, have been forced to overcome a past that should have already been rel-egated to the past (“obligadas a rebasar un pasado que debería ser definitivamente pasado” 203). In other words, rather than living in the present with an eye toward the future and its hopes, Spain and its former colonies, according to Zea, have been stuck in the sixteenth century, unable to keep up with North America and the rest of Europe.

Zea had advanced similar claims in a much earlier study, trans-lated as The Latin American Mind (Dos etapas del Pensamiento en Hispanoamérica, 1949). In this study, he argues—with specific reference

8 ● Time Travel in Latin American and Caribbean Imagination

to Spanish American political and economic stagnation—that

the past, if it is not completely assimilated, always makes itself felt as present. In each gesture, in every act carried out by the Hispanic-American man, the past becomes evident . . . Meanwhile the rest of the world marched forward, progressed, and made his-tory. Hispanic America continued to be a continent without his-tory, without a past, because the past was always present. (10)

While there is much in this passage that merits unpacking (how, for example, does one assimilate the past? Who is this “Hispanic-American man”? What about women? How does one “make” history? How does one define “progress”? etc.), Zea’s basic idea is that Latin Americans have a different rapport with historical processes than resi-dents of other regions. This is so primarily due to the tragedy that was the Conquest and its aftermath. Similarly, in his seminal The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950), Octavio Paz advances a (highly general-izing) claim not unlike Zea’s by arguing that Mexicans “carry about with them, in rags, a still-living past” (65) [“arrastran en andrajos un pasado todavía vivo”] (88). Not surprisingly, in both the Caribbean and Latin America during the colonial era, “progress” was seen as something that came from elsewhere, and the regions themselves were often seen as backwaters existing for the benefit of the metropolis. In light of these historical trends, my contention in this study—one that will be presented in different ways in the chapters that consti-tute it—is that the time travel that occurs in much of the cultural production from the Americas can be linked to Zea’s and Paz’s views on a different engagement with time, history, and memory in the region. In other words, it seems but a short step from these views to fictional responses that seek somehow to resist and/or overcome them. Such fictional responses—that is, occurrences of time travel that include the Conquest and the modern era—suggest that the time travelers I discuss are somehow attempting to rewind the clock and undo the Conquest and its effects. In so doing they seek to reconfig-ure human activity in the region so that in it, history can begin to move forward.

This rewinding of the clock can be linked, in turn—insofar as literature is concerned—to an idea expressed first by Octavio Paz

Introduction ● 9

in 1969 and expanded upon later by Roberto González Echevarría. The latter explains that in Latin America there prevails a “literature of foundations” (an expression he borrows from Paz) because of the “lack of self-assurance” in the region and doubts about its sociocul-tural legitimacy (“Latin American and Comparative Literatures” 96). These doubts must stem, at least in part, from the debilitat-ing effects of the Conquest. Consequently, any time travelers to the Conquest (i.e., the “foundation”—or, to use a more current phras-ing, the “Ground Zero”—of hemispheric anxieties) seek to under-mine and reverse this event. There is unanimity in this regard: as concerns time travelers to the Conquest—whether in the writings of Eco, Aridjis, Zea, and so on—this epoch is a source of ongoing dissatisfaction and must be altered (even if in the fictional realm) or reinvisioned. No one writing in recent decades (to a wide audi-ence, at least) approves and celebrates the Conquest. This is the case regardless of whether the writer can be said to belong to a group that mostly benefitted or suffered from the events of the Conquest and early colonial period in the Americas.

These notions of “rewinding” the clock, reversing events, and mov-ing freely across temporal continuums may, quite correctly, remind readers of pre-Columbian and/or Mesoamerican temporalities, in which time is not necessarily understood as flowing in linear fashion but instead as following circular and repetitive trajectories. In Maya Conquistador, the anthropologist Matthew Restall discusses—as Tzvetan Todorov and Sandra M. Cypess had also done in The Conquest of America and La Malinche in Mexican Literature, respectively—how the events of the Conquest disrupted what had become a common way for pre-Columbian societies to engage with temporality:

If dramatic and violent episodes in the Conquest punctuated what was otherwise a gradual process that may have been perceived by Mayas as characterized more by continuity than change, there are hints in the Maya accounts that Mesoamerican conceptions of time may have bolstered the impression of continuity . . . The Nahuas, for example, also used notions of temporal cyclicity, of the past’s prediction of the present, and of meaningful continuities from pre-Conquest times to de-emphasize change and to counter the poten-tial trauma of disjuncture with the prehispanic past. (41–42)