Cara de santo consiste cuentos que están basados principalmente sobre migración de los costarricenses y también los centroamericanos en Estados Unidos. Los inmigrantes vienen de diferente parte de la sociedad – los ricos, pobres y su enfoque hacia vida y las necesidades son diferentes. El humor es también el aspecto importante de mayoría de los cuentos. Además, tratan de temas como aislamiento, la marginalización, el intento de sobrevivir y una mezcla de lenguas (inglés y español). La mayoría de los cuentos están narrados en la primera persona, contando sobre su vida y a veces la razón para emigrar de su país nativo, su trabajo y como se pasa su vida en Estados Unidos.

En el primer cuento que se llama Para que se lo lleve el viento la narradora dice “Uno no viene aquí solo porque quiere. Ni tampoco porque lo empujan. Cuando las calles se hacen cortas, y la cosa encoge mucho, uno agarra sus cosillas y se tira a pista hasta que llega. Siempre hacia el norte. De abajo a arriba” (Pg 15). Trabaja en el mercado y compara el mercado con la iglesia porque viene todo; algunos para comprar y “unos para el estomago” (Pg 16). Es un pequeño cuento de una página, habla de su negocio y no dice sobre su familia o su manera de sobrevivir en un país extranjero. El otro cuento que se llama Videovida también tiene muchos aspectos semejantes con el  primer cuento. Este cuento es de un hombre que viene de Costa Rica, da clases de música a los jóvenes y actúa como consejero en un programa radial. Vemos palabras ingleses escrita en español como ‘grin card’, magacín, tevé.  No tiene amigos ni familia. La única manera de pasar su tiempo es ver la tele y dice que si no hubiera sido la tele, el habría suicidado. Este cuento también muestra manera de evitar entrar en algún tipo de conflicto o cosas arriesgadas. Por ejemplo dice el narrador “Me cambiaron mi nombre. No quise que me pusieran el de profesor tal o cual porque eso siempre se presta a tener problemas con ciertos profesionales, latinos por más señas, que se la pasan buscando ilegales en todos esos programas, para denunciarlos a la migra” (Pg 21).

Este libro menciona cuentos sobre personas importantes, por ejemplo un modelo que está obsesionado con su cuerpo y también la importancia de ingles entre diferente tipo de persona. Por ejemplo un narrador que ha entrado en Estados Unidos por cruzar el rio y está buscando un trabajo (Cara de Santo, Unas de gato), necesita aprender inglés para sobrevivir, aunque no le gusta como él dice “A mí no me interesa estudiar inglés o hablarlo, esto se lo digo sinceramente” (Pg 31); pero al otro lado el cuento De un anuncio Calvin Klein sobre el modelo menciona “Dominio de un leguaje en donde reside la clave de todo” (Pg 59).  Además, hay cuento como Snuff  que tiene mezcla de diferentes estrategias narrativas (la entrada en el diario, narrando en la tercera persona y también en la primera persona plural).

Reading this book was an interesting experience for me. All the essays in this book discuss intent to define and try to understand the role played by testimonio from various perspectives.  Where on the one hand John Beverly in his essay Margin at the centre talks about testimonio versus fiction, testimonio versus literature as he mentions “but to subsume testimonio under the category of literary fictionality is to deprive it of its power to engage the reader in the ways I have indicated here, to make of it simply another form of literature, as good as but certainly no better than and not basically different from what is already the case” (Pg 35). Or “Unlike the novel, testimonio promises by definition to be primarily concerned with sincerity rather than literariness” (Pg 26). George Yudice relates testimonio to the fundamental aspect of post modernism, that is, to reject “grand or master narratives” (Pg 43 – 44), and adds that “the rejection of the master narratives thus implies a different subject of discourse, one that does not conceive of itself as universal and as searching for universal truth but, rather, as seeking emancipation and survival within specific and local circumstances” (Pg 44). On the other hand, Elzbieta Sklodowska calls her essay Spanish American Testimonial Novel where she explores the relationship between life stories, novels and testimonios. She concludes by saying that “we will a step closer to recognizing the fact that testimonio does not provide a solution to the problems of Latin American expression, but it continues the same old quest in a new guise” (Pg 99). Doris Sommer argues about the technicality of the genre, the relationship between the narrator and the reader which has been mediated at various levels, hence, the limitation to access the text. Shre question in her text Beverly’s argument  that “testimonio is poised against literature” (Pg 132), tries to find a relation with the autobiographical style, (though she later differs it on the ground of ‘I’ of testimonio which is collective and ‘I’ of autobiography which is singular) and argues that “This relative autonomy, however, may be on the eve of capitulation because, as Gusdorf further observes, the very fact that a first – person singular is marshaled to narrate a plural history is a symptom of Western penetration” (Pg 146).

However, in second part of the book, the two most interesting articles are by Alberto Morieras – The Aura of testimonio and Gareth Williams – The fantasies of cultural exchange in Latin American subaltern studies. Both the text destabilized and deconstructed the fundamental aspects of testimonio. They questioned the existence of testimonio and all the arguments that are based on it.

In this reading, Gareth Williams questions the position of Latin American models of representation and the North American intellectuals or the Latin Americanists in North America. He states that there is a relation of center – periphery between Latin American subjects/subalterns and North American intellectuals. He also talks about the dichotomy like I/Other, where the ‘I’ is the center (Latin Americanists in North America) and their theorization of the ‘other’ (theories that are based on Latin American subalterns). However, the theories of the ‘other’ also help to define oneself (i.e. the ‘I’) and to overcome aspects that are missing in their culture. Hence, factors like solidarity, resistance, leading a life close to nature, harmony become fantasies which they wanted to possess. Williams explains it as “Rigoberta Menchu and Maya – Quiche are viewed as an expression of value: that of carrying the load of a single social, global function; becoming the means by which the First World can reflect upon itself and define its own areas of struggle and political engagement. The Latin American subaltern becomes everything the United States lacks and craves in order for it to think itself” (Pg 244).

The anti-disciplinary or the anti hegemonic elements which define the testimonial genre have not altered. According to Williams it is actually functioning within the same center-periphery relation. He gives example of Rigoberta Menchu’s testimonio in which Elisabeth Burgos Debray says ““ella [Rigoberta] me permitio el descubrimiento de mi otro yo. Gracias a ella mi yo americano ya no es una ‘inquietante rareza’”” (Pg 230). Gareth Wiiliams further adds that “Rigoberta is positioned as the object of “centrist” desire by means of which the metropolitan restitutor embarks upon a transatlantic journey of self-restitution to “America”” (Pg 230).  This position is also enjoyed by the Latin Americanists. According to Williams, (as he mentions in his notes) that testimonio has become a new institution/ has been institutionalized for academic endeavor in the era of Late capitalism. Or it can also be said that hegemonic exploitation and “a negatively signed colonial history of subaltern loss” “is transformed into a “positive” reminder to the hegemonic of their own possible myth of origins” (Pg 245).

Is testimonio a creation based on fantasy? Do testimonios in any manner challenge the hegemony or the institution of literature? Does testimonial genre exist or is it just a myth?

In this essay, Morieras talks about the fixed factors of testimonio and its problems. He argues that Testimonio has been a substitution of ‘(high) literature’. As he says “High literature is no longer effective, it would seem, in the fight against late – capitalist globalization: instead, other cultural possibilities must be investigated” (Pg 194). The argument then focuses on whether testimonio carries the literary, post literary or extraliterary aspects and he says that even being literary it ‘incorporates an abandonment of literary’. He further explains this as “Testimonio provides its reader with the possibility of entering what we might call a subdued sublime the twilight region where the literary breaks off into something else, which is not so much the real as it is its unguarded possibility. This unguarded possibility of the real, which is arguably the very core of the testimonial experience, is also its preeminent political claim” (Pg 195).

In the next part of his argument, as I have mentioned in the first line, he questions the characteristics which define testimonio. For example he talks about solidarity, which is one of the important factors to define testimonio and Morieras says that “solidarity, although not in any case to be excluded, no longer can be the sole motivation for us to engage testimonio as its readers and dissemination” (Pg 196). He also adds that “testimonio does not produce solidarity, but only a poetics of solidarity of a fallen and derivative kind” (Pg 198). Canonizing testimonio on the basis of poetics of solidarity can also prove to ‘reliteraturization’/reinstitutionalization of the genre against which it is fighting. Hence, there is a chance of appropriation of the genre into the (high) literature or creating another center – periphery relation as argued by Gareth Williams in Fantasies of Cultural exchange. Testimonio, also does not depend on the ‘suppressed and the subaltern’, on the expansion of disciplinary discourse and on the urgency to talk about the oppression.  However, according Moreiras the extra literary aspect of testimonio could be the secrets of Rigoberta Menchu that she denies to reveal in her testimonio. Moreiras mentions in his text that “I would claim that the secret, in Menchu’s text, stands for whatever cannot and should not be reabsorbed into the literary – representational system: the secret is the (secret) key to the real as unguarded possibility” (Pg 206).

All these arguments make me question the role of testimonio, how to define testimonio, can it be defined or is it that by defining it we are again restricting/limiting its edges? What is a testimonio then? Is it a perspective, an approach to read a text? Can then we can call any text a testimonio? As Alberto Morieras argues in his essay “If testimonio as we understood it today is a primary form of cultural manifestation for a wide variety of social movements whose politics are politics of identity, then the question ultimately affects all the disciplinary possibilities of dealing with the identitarian claims of social movements” (Pg 214).