The Limits of Latinx Representation

Abstract

AbstractThis essay considers a crisis in the literary form we call “the novel” and the political form we call “democracy.” As many scholars have argued, these forms had a crucial convergence in the late eighteenth century: while novels made it easier for subjects to identify as rational decision-makers in secular social worlds, democracy became these subjects’ preferred way of institutionalizing political power. To be sure, most early novels helped consolidate the upper classes, but with each passing decade, an increasing number have sought to open democracy to the disenfranchised. However, when contemporary novels take up the cause of unauthorized migration, they often struggle to raise cultural awareness—and overwhelmingly fail to produce political change. In this context, Valeria Luiselli’s Lost Children Archive (2019) tries to see—and see beyond—three limits of Latinx representation. Against a literary lineage that prizes complete portrayals of exemplary people, it demonstrates that completion and comprehension are often impossible. Similarly, amidst a culture industry in which “representation matters,” it explains why the category “Latinx” is usually inadequate to the diversity of migrant life. Finally, in a nation said to be a “representative democracy,” it shows how divisions between citizens and migrants are untenable.Lost Children Archive reenergizes the novel in/of democracy by reckoning with its limits. . . . whereas many novels have enabled their readers to feel like they lived in democracies, Lost Children Archive confronts us with other ways of imagining and institutionalizing political life—and political death.