Disrupting Time: A Theory of Haunting in "Their Dogs Came With Them"

In the 1990s, owing in no small part to Derrida’s publication of Spectres of Marx, literary criticism and theory takes what is sometimes to referred to as “the spectral turn”. Spectrality as a theoretical paradigm... [ view full abstract ]

In the 1990s, owing in no small part to Derrida’s publication of Spectres of Marx, literary criticism and theory takes what is sometimes to referred to as “the spectral turn”. Spectrality as a theoretical paradigm emphasizes the deep violences that are both inherited by the 20th century and produced from it. Spectrality’s emphasis on absent-presence, on ghostliness, on trauma, on memory and forgetting, on repression, and its ties into violence, into horror, into the limits of language itself, make it uniquely situated to deal with a variety of marginalized figures that continue to return, to haunt, to disrupt and to displace the national project. This paper will explore the notions of spectrality and haunting as a useful paradigm for encountering Latino Literature of the post-civil rights era, through the boom period in the 1990s.

While Latino literature of the civil rights and pre-civil rights era is a marked by a desire to identify, name, articulate, and in no small measure to legitimate Latino presence in the United States, I will argue that the literature after civil rights, particularly the literature of the boom period is marked by decidedly different tensions. Specifically, Latino writers of the later generation are haunted not only by their marginality within US white supremacist culture, but are further haunted by the specter and remove of Latin America. In short, I am contending that Latino Literature of this period is dually haunted, by American marginality on the one hand, and by distance and distinction from Latin America on the other hand. While the idea of, to borrow Anzaldua’s phrasing, a nepantla consciousness is not new within Latino discourse, the spectres of Latin America, and the violent and haunting effect they have on US Latino writers is striking.

To situate my readings of haunting and spectrality within Latino Literature, for the purposes of this paper, I will be looking at Helena Maria Viramontes’s Their Dogs Came with Them, to argue for the way in which the past returns, haunts, complicates, and replicates violences of conquest in multiple registers simultaneously. By arguing that Viramontes uses the cityscape of Los Angeles as a palimpsest, the paper will explore the multiply layered violences that occur within the context of Latino hauntings.