"The 21st-Century City": Hollywood and Latina/o L.A. in Abella's The Killing of the Saints

Despite early praise from The New York Times and Los Angeles Times Cuban American author Alex Abella’s first detective novel in the Charlie Morell trilogy The Killing of the Saints (1991) has gone out of print and received... [ view full abstract ]

Despite early praise from The New York Times and Los Angeles Times Cuban American author Alex Abella’s first detective novel in the Charlie Morell trilogy The Killing of the Saints (1991) has gone out of print and received little scholarly attention. Set in Los Angeles with flashbacks to Miami, the neo-noir crime tale tracks the exploits of hardboiled Cuban American private investigator Charlie Morell as he solves a multiple homicide committed during a foiled jewelry heist by the villainous Afro-Cuban Marielito santero Ramón Valdéz while under the control of the orisha of war and metallurgy Oggun. The Killing of the Saints, however, is by no means the great, undiscovered Cuban American detective novel. Its perplexing prose, clichéd characters, and improbable plot have all doomed it to anonymity. Worse yet, the novel’s depiction of Santería reinforces essentialized understandings of race and well-worn stereotypes of Afro-Caribbean religions.

Its many flaws notwithstanding, the novel’s portrayal of Los Angeles offers possibilities for promiscuously rethinking geographies of Latinidad across the U.S.-Mexico and Caribbean borderlands by representing the City of Angels as a migratory palimpsest marked by multiple, layered, overlapping Latina/o communities with intermingled connections to Aztlán, Central America, and the Caribbean. Yet rather than trying to tease apart the good from the bad, my paper insists that the merits and demerits of The Killing of the Saints converge in its depiction of Latina/o L.A. through pastiche of Hollywood genres. If, as Abella insists, Los Angeles is “the 21st-Century city,” the metropolitan megalopolis that emerges in his fiction serves as a critical prism refracting racist fantasies encoded into U.S. popular genres, fantasies that justify colonial imperialism, promote the American dream, and in the process, catalyze northward migrations from the Global South.