Born in the USA: Breeding Political Violence in Héctor Tobar's The Tattooed Soldier

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Born in the USA:Breeding Political Violence in Héctor Tobar's The Tattooed Soldier Dale Pattison (bio) In the summer of 2014, the national news media began reporting on the sudden influx and subsequent detention of migrant women and children crossing the U.S./Mexico border. Fleeing violence and poverty in Central America, these migrants quickly found themselves at the heart of an ongoing debate on the nation's responsibility to care for, or to reject, migrants in need. In addressing the emerging humanitarian crisis, pundits and politicians all too often failed to probe the underlying causes for the sudden increase in immigration from Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras—all economically disadvantaged countries ravaged by gang violence and long histories of political unrest. Although many commentators would focus on the conditions of violence and poverty in these countries, seldom did the conversation turn to the history of Central America in the twentieth century and the United States' involvement in creating and sustaining a state of political instability in the region.1 What few in the media were willing to acknowledge was that the political dilemma created by these undocumented migrants was in fact a product of the United States' foreign policy in Central America decades earlier. The crisis on the border that occurred in 2014 is in many ways anticipated and foretold in Héctor Tobar's 1998 novel, The Tattooed Soldier, a work that at first glance has little to do with immigration politics or American foreign policy. In presenting a revenge narrative centered on two Guatemalan refugees—enemies in their home country—who bring their blood feud to the streets of Los Angeles, Tobar offers a subtle and prescient critique of the ways in which the United States' foreign policy in Central America in the latter half of the twentieth century—rooted in an emerging doctrine of neoliberalism in the Americas—produced political violence that would ultimately return to haunt the U.S. [End Page 113] at the turn of the twenty-first century. Irrevocably scarred by the human consequences of U.S. economic and military intervention in Guatemala, both characters deliver the political violence that created them, so to speak, to its place of origin: the United States. This article uses Tobar's novel to examine the ways in which political violence—like that experienced by the people of Central America in the latter half of the twentieth century, and embodied in those migrants crossing the U.S./Mexico border—can be neither contained nor repelled by national borders. Once created, political violence moves within and among bodies, and nations that export political violence, Tobar's novel suggests, render themselves susceptible to its inevitable return. The novel's revenge narrative concerns the lives of two Guatemalan refugees, Antonio Bernal and Guillermo Longoria, who meet each other in a Los Angeles city park seven years after their initial confrontation in Guatemala, during which Longoria, a member of the Guatemalan government's elite Jaguar Battalion, ruthlessly murdered Antonio's wife and child. Having escaped Guatemala after experiencing this violence, Antonio struggles to establish himself in Los Angeles, where he has difficulty holding jobs and securing stable living spaces. The novel opens, for instance, with Antonio being evicted from his apartment and thereby entering the state of homelessness that will carry him through the duration of the novel. Believing himself to have escaped the political violence of his past, Antonio is shocked when he stumbles upon Longoria playing chess in nearby MacArthur Park, and all of the repressed memories of his family's murder come flooding back to him. Challenging our inclination to read Antonio as the representative victim of political violence, Tobar focuses more explicitly on situating Longoria, the monstrous ex-soldier indoctrinated by a brutal military regime and trained by the U.S. government, as the unacknowledged victim of political trauma. By providing lengthy narrative detours that develop Longoria's character, Tobar situates him, in addition to Antonio, as paradoxically deserving of our sympathy. In both cases, Tobar concerns himself explicitly with addressing how victims of political violence—particularly those severed from their homelands as a result of political upheaval—process trauma in an environment that denies...