La escritura de la memoria y del trauma en Tijuana: crimen y olvido de Luis Humberto Crosthwaite

Abstract

In Tijuana: crimen y olvido Luis Humberto Crosthwaite creates a narrative fiction as a mirror of a society that looses the capacity to broach the subject of its own disintegration. Confronting the absence of a constructive debate on forced disappearance of persons in media and politics and the lack of a social framework where the issue of the memory of the victims could be addressed, the novel proposes a reflection on the limits of the construction of meaning about violence. The narrative construction of his work stresses the issue of forced disappearance of journalists on a metaficcional level: by means of successively intertwined stories, the characters try to find the reasons for the disappearing, make sense of violence and deal with the loss of a beloved person. Their failing attempts to do so are reflected in the process of writing which is continuously fragmented and fails to construe a stable meaning. Thus Tijuana: crimen y olvido represents psychological distress and social and symbolic disintegration as results of forced disappearances of persons. At the same time, the reader is able to observe different ways of processing limit experiences: the attempt to elaborate the experience of violence in a story (working through) and the obsessive repetition of traumatic experience (acting out).

Keywords

• forced disappearance
• luis humberto crosthwaite
• tijuana
• trauma
• violence