<em>Santitos</em>: Loss, the Catholic Sleuth, and the Transnational Mestiza Consciousness

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Death is an unquestionable part of our lives, a matter of time, the only thing we know for certain. The death of your own child, however, is a matter of disbeUef, perhaps madness. How do cultures account for the deaths of their children? How does Hterature address their loss, mourning and rage? In Maria Amparo Escandon's novel Santitos [Esperanza's Box ofSaintsY (1999), a young widow, Esperanza, stares death in the face walking the fine line between loss and madness, healing and trauma for over two hundred pages. As the author has explained, this is the main question of the novel: if I was told my daughter had died and I wasn't able to confirm her death? My immediate reaction w^ould be to deny it. To prove them wrong I would do what anyone else would in this case: anything and everything. Cali on otherworldly forces for guidance? Sure. Set out to find her who knows where in the world? Of course. Become a prostitute? You bet. And in the process of looking for her, Pd most likely find myself. (http://www.sdlatinofilm.com). In the novel Esperanza Diaz has just lost her twelve-year-old daughter to an unexplained virus. The last time she saw her, Blanca was in the hospital to have her tonsils removed. Suddenly she is reported dead. What foUows gives the novel an unlikely twist. The night of the funeral Esperanza experiences a vision from San Judas Tadeo, patron saint of desperate cases. Speaking through his image on the oven window, he tells her that her daughter is not dead. Then, Esperanza sets off with her box of saints to look for her daughter. This journey takes her from her native town of Veracruz to Tijuana, then to the Mexican side of Los Angeles and finally back home again. Santitos not only articulates the complexities of loss, melancholia, and mourning but also links these elements to create new forms of representation for the most recent Latin American novel. As loss becomes the