“He Hopes They Have Disappeared”: Necro-elasticity and the Tyranny of the Present in Helena María Viramontes’s “The Cariboo Cafe”

Abstract

Abstract This essay investigates the ways in which Helena María Viramontes’s “The Cariboo Cafe” (1985) depicts the necropolitical order of power in Central America and the United States during the decades-long civil wars (late 1970s to early 1990s) marked by racial violence and brutality committed by US-backed dictatorial regimes and police enforcement in both Central American and the United States. “The Cariboo Cafe” offers critical insights into the dialectical operations of the bio-necropolitical order of power in which the exposure to harm, injury, and death (that is, precarity) of racialized segments of the population serve to foster and secure the lives of those considered politically and, thus, ontologically relevant. The spatial and temporal dimensions of the story offer key insights into the specific ways in which necro-elasticity constitutes both spatial and temporal dispossession. Such dispossession, especially in its temporal configuration, points to the flattening of historical consciousness, what I refer to as “non-contextualization,” that ultimately underwrites the ideological conditions of possibility for the emergence and reproduction of individual and collective innocence and, thus, impunity.