City and Literature. Cuando Sara Chura despierte by Juan Pablo Piñeiro

Abstract

The current paper is part of a larger research around the concept of city in XXI century Bolivia. It is my idea that Bolivian literature reveals the existing tensions between the different cultures that coexist and overlap in La Paz city. The modern urban imaginary invests space with several meanings and explores the shades of coexistence between Western and Andean cultures. The characters are passers- by who give several meanings to the “physical city”, and disclose the existence of a “hidden speech” (Scott, 2000: 28) that reveals certain mechanisms of rebellion in those who were oppressed within those structures of power. In these pages, I will try to analyze the novel Cuando Sara Chura despierte (2004) by Juan Pablo Piñeiro. In its story, the city is portrayed as a haunted house. Space is conceived as an infinite trim of voices and underground worlds which were made invisible by western rational thought. The passing of the characters through the interstice of the streets and through intimate spaces, functions as a way to avoid control and surveillance of a dominant culture and implies the possibility of stitching the colonial wound.