The Decolonial Project of Salvador Plascencia’s The People of Paper

Abstract

Salvador Plascencia’s The People of Paper is considered a highly innovative novel, hailed by critics as avant-garde and experimental. However, many have also emphasized its (white) postmodernist aesthetics, often placing it in conversation with the works of writers such as David Foster Wallace, Dave Eggers, and George Saunders. A more robust reading of the text is necessary, one that accounts for its formal aesthetics but also privileges its place within the Latina/o canon. This essay argues that reading The People of Paper as a genrebending text allows us to converse with Gloria Anzaldúa’s theory of autohistoria, which enhances the novel’s greater decolonial project. Reading the novel through autohistoria theory helps us understand how the text breaks down grand narratives of Eurocentricity as well as one-dimensional narratives of an oppressed Latina/o population. Ultimately, the novel portrays the destructive nature of these marketable “sad stories” and shows how they commodify Chicana/o and Latina/o bodies. We conclude that Plascencia’s aesthetics do not make the text any less a Latina/o novel. Instead, the novel draws connections to decolonial and Chicana feminist theories to demonstrate how these aesthetics do important deconstructive work.