Indebted Life, Gothic Mothers: A New Puerto Rican Genealogy in the Short Stories of Yolanda Arroyo Pizarro

The archipelago of Puerto Rico is a colony in debt. Debt, according to Lucí Cavallero and Verónica Gago, goes hand in hand with the disciplining of bodies, especially female, queer, and dissident bodies. Therefore, colony and debt possess certain characteristics—confinement, violence and subjugation—that coincide with the definition of the Gothic mode in that both involve control, stalking and murder, like in horror and terror fiction. With this in mind, I propose a Gothic interpretation of three short stories by Afro Puerto Rican writer Yolanda Arroyo Pizarro, published between 2007 and 2015, in times of debt and austerity. They are stories about Black, Indigenous and/or poor women who are under attack, forced to serve as labor, spoils of war and scapegoats of all social ills. Furthermore, they are Gothic stories firstly because they are tales about violence against women–more specifically, mothers–and secondly because the protagonists themselves perpetrate violence against others, including infanticide and kidnapping. My analysis suggests that this series of Gothic tales establishes a new genealogy that dismantles the official discourse on Puerto Rican identity, which is rooted in the idea of the White, Hispanic, heteronormative family. This Gothic genealogy helps us elucidate the true colonial debt: the invisibilization of the bodies and the silencing of the voices of the most vulnerable throughout the history of the archipelago from its colonization in 1493 to the present day marked by debt and crisis.

Sandra M. Casanova-Vizcaíno is Associate Professor of Spanish at Binghamton University-State University of New York, where she teaches Latin American and Caribbean literature, film, and culture. Her research interests include contemporary Gothic and horror fiction, and representations of violence in Latin American and Caribbean literature and film. Her first book, El gótico transmigrado: narrativa puertorriqueña de horror, terror y misterio en el siglo XXI (Corregidor 2021), studies monstrosity, violence, and dystopia in 21st-century Puerto Rican fiction. She co-edited the volumes Latin American Gothic in Literature and Culture (Routledge 2018), and Aquelarre de cuentos: antología de terror insólito escrito por mujeres (Huso 2021), and she is the author of multiple articles and book chapters on contemporary Puerto Rican narrative.