The Future as Form: Undoing the Categorical Separation of Class and Gender in Ana Castillo’s Sapogonia.

Abstract

The Future as Form: Undoing the Categorical Separation of Class and Gender in Ana Castillo’s Sapogonia Marcial Gonzalez In an article on Junot Diaz’s much celebrated novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Elena Machado Saez seeks to unsettle the claim that the form of the contemporary novel “mimics” the form of the nation, a bordered space of belonging that incorporates multiple perspectives into a unified but conflicted voice and consolidates “different subcultures into one community” (Saez 522). Referring specifically to Oscar Wao as an exemplary case, Saez argues that the novel can also “embody the structure and linguistic diversity of” (522-23) a diaspora—migratory, perpetually dispersed, and constantly positioned at a far distance from the centeredness of a grounded homeland. Building on Saez’s argument, I would add that the U.S. ethnic immigrant novel (and I’m thinking here of Ana Castillo’s 1994 novel Sapogonia, in particular) can also take the form of a migration not only toward or away from a geographical place or a geopolitical sense of community, but across the temporalities of history itself, transgressing the demarcations of past, present and future. Sapogonia chal- lenges a trend in contemporary American novels that have ceased to find im- portance in the future—novels that have succumbed to what Fredric Jameson calls “the immense privileging of the present.” “We seem to have forgotten,” Jameson asserts, “the ability to conceptualize the future in our contemporary historical moment. We find it easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.” 1 Consequently, much contemporary literature places little importance in conceptualizing a post-capitalist future, whether that future is socialism, communism, or some other social formation that we have not yet even imagined. Though not unproblematically, Sapogonia works against this anti-future tendency by alluding to the abolition of social categories—in par- ticular, class and gender—a development that conceivably could only be real- ized in the future. What’s remarkable about Sapogonia’s fascination with the future is that this is a novel about working-class Latinas and Latinos, mainly immigrants, and the immigrant experience crystalizes at a nexus of concrete po- litical and economic realities that make the fight for a better future nearly prohibitive and yet urgent. It is this fascination with the future that gives form to the novel. Sapogonia explores the social, psychological, and ideological effects of U.S. imperialist intervention and civil war in Central America on the Latina/o immi-