Masquerade and

Social Jiistico in
Contemporary Latin American
Fiction
Helene Carol Weldt-Basson

Univeisity of New Mexico Press • Albuquerque

© 2017 by the University of New Mexico Press In loving memory of my mother, Lucille Weldt (1927-2015),
All rights reserved. Published 2017 whom I miss every day
Printed in the United States of America
22 21 20 19 18 17 123456

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Weldt-Basson, Helene Carol, 1958- author.
Title: Masquerade and social justice in contemporary Latin American
fiction / Helene Carol Weldt-Basson.
Description: First edition. I Albuquerque : University of New Mexico Press,
2017.1 Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016031607 (print) I LCCN 2016049216 (ebook) I
ISBN 9780826358158 (hardback) I ISBN 9780826358165 (electronic)
Subjects: LCSH: Latin American fiction—21st century—History and criti­
cism. I Latin American fiction—20th century—History and criticism. I
Masquerades in literature. I Disguise in literature. 1 Social justice in liter­
ature. I BISAC:
LITERARY CRITICISM / Caribbean Sc Latin American.
Classification: LCC PQ7082.N7 W43 2017 (print) I LCC PQ7082.N7
(ebook) I DDC 863/.70998—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016031607

Cover illustration created by Freepik for Flaticon

Designed by Felicia Cedillos
Composed in Sabon 10.5/14.5
Contents

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction. Masquerade and Literature i

1. Disguise and Distributive Justice

La comparsa by Sergio Galindo and El paratso
en la otra esquina and Travesuras de la nina mala
by Mario Vargas Llosa Z3

2. Postmodern Justice
Ethical Feminism in Isabel Allende’s Hija de la
fortuna, Antonio Benitez-Rojo’s Mujer en traje
de batalla, Marcela Serrano’s Nuestra sehora de la
soledad, and Sara Sefchovich’s La seitora de
lossuenos 53

3. Postcolonial Structural Justice

Isabel Allende’s Zorro and Carmen Boullosa’s
Duerme 87

4. Allegories of Transitional Justice

Masquerade in Novela negra con argentinos
by Luisa Valenzuela and Mascara by Ariel
Dorfman 117
viii ContGnts

5. Historical Justice
Masquerade and Trauma in Augusto Roa Bastos’s
El fiscal, Mayra Santos-Febres’s Fe en disfraz, and Acknowledgments
Fernando del Paso’s Noticias del imperio 147

Conclusion. Why Study Masquerade? 179

Notes 191

Works Cited 199

Index 21I

I would like to thank Dean Debbie Storrs of the University of North

Dakota, who arranged a semester of research leave so that I could com­
plete this book. Thanks also go to Dr. Dianna Niebylski, editor of
Letras Femeninas, for allowing me to use the material from my article
“Zorro by Isabel Allende: Masquerade, Identity, and Postcolonial Jus­
tice,” Letras Femeninas 40, no. 2 (Winter 2014): 129-40, which is an
earlier version of part of chapter 3 of this book. I would also like to
thank the publication team at the University of New Mexico Press for
their hard work on this project, especially my editor, Elise McHugh,
designer Felicia Cedillos, and copyeditor Norman Ware.
Finally, as always, I would like to thank my family and friends for
their unfailing support.
Introduction. Mascpjerade artd^Lfterature

Overview of Masquerade in Literary Criticism

Masquerade, loosely defined as the wearing of a disguise or the

adoption of an identity other than one’s own, is a characteristic
motif in Latin American literature that typically serves either to aid
in the fight for social justice or to expose the lack of social justice in
Latin America. This book examines this important link between
masquerade and justice by analyzing five types of social justice: dis­
tributive, postmodern, postcolonial, transitional, and historical.
Although much has been written about masquerade and disguise in
other literatures and cultures, this function related to social justice
is chiefly found in Latin American fiction because of the region’s
social and historical reality. Latin American history has been char­
acterized by such problems as social stigma suffered by individuals
owing to racism or poverty and psychological trauma provoked by
torture, disappeared bodies, and other abuses of dictatorship. Since
psychological disorders are a chief motivating factor of disguise, the
intertwining of masquerade and social justice is something unique
that is repeatedly depicted in Latin American literature. In order to
appreciate this difference from other regions and contextualize my
subsequent discussion, I will briefly review what has previously been
written about masquerade and disguise in other literatures. I will
then touch upon what has been written about masquerade in Latin
American literature largely with regard to male transvestism, which
is different from my focus here because those studies center on issues

I

of gender and sexuality. Finally, I will trace the roots of the connec­
tion between masquerade and social justice that I establish here to
the practice of Carnival celebrations and the figure of the comic
book superhero.
The social practices of masquerade and disguise and their corre­
sponding motif in fictional narrative are broad topics that have been
studied in varying degrees in different countries with regard to their
customs and literary works. Most material on the subject relates to
England and Russia, with select texts that examine the topic in Africa,
France, and Latin America. Given the impossibility of discussing the
topic of masquerade worldwide, below is a brief overview of some of
the most important and pertinent books and book collections on the
topic.
Little has been written about masquerade in the twentieth- and
twenty-first-century novel. Most books on masquerade have focused
on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with an emphasis on mas­
querade in theatrical texts and performances. Lloyd Davies, in his
book Guise and Disguise: Rhetoric and Characterization in the
English Renaissance, published in 1993, examines literary texts from
the Renaissance (late fifteenth to early seventeenth century) in
England. Davies’s thesis is that during this time period, the motif of
masquerade is intertwined with character development, rendering the
motif “problematic, since either ‘ethos’ or ‘poiesis’ may determine its
meaning” (6). “Ethos” implies that a certain spirit or controlling force
is behind the character, while “poiesis” suggests that a character
undergoes a process of development and is free to form himself in any
direction. Thus, disguise makes character development more ambig­
uous because it presents “an opposition between essentialist [ethos]
and representational [poiesis] notions of selfhood” (6). Davies devel­
ops his idea of the link between character and masquerade, indicating
that there are three major functions of disguise: (i) disguise “fore­
grounds the interplay and conflicts between vision and language in
the production of self and persona.... Disguise depicts a semiotics of
characterization” (9); (2) disguise establishes hierarchies between pri­
mary, secondary, and other characters and reproduces the dialectic
between essentialist and nonessentialist character development; and
Masquerade an
(3) disguise posits character development as a dialogic p
between the one who masquerades and other characters and t
represents an ideology of characterization (9). Davies undertakes a
analysis of these three functions through an examination of pairs of
opposite figures in Renaissance literature: the king versus the courtier,
the subject versus the traitor, and man versus woman. According to
Davies, these pairings allow literary works to treat political, sexual,
and subversive topics (ii).
Another pioneering book on masquerade is Terry Castle’s Mas­
querade and Civilization: The Carnivalesque in Eighteenth-Century
English Culture and Fiction (1987). Castle’s history explores numer­
ous aspects of masquerade balls and Carnival, including masquerade
as a “kind of collective mediation on self and other, and an explora­
tion of this mysterious dialectic” (4). Moreover, Castle emphasizes
how masquerade enacted a “reversal of ordinary sexual, social and
metaphysical hierarchies. The cardinal ideological distinctions under­
lying eighteenth-century cultural life, including fundamental distinc­
tions of sex and class, were breached” (6). Castle stresses that these
two aspects of masquerade (the questions of identity and equality)
respectively reflect interpretation of the phenomenon on two levels:
the psychological (the meaning of masquerade to the individual) and
the anthropological (masquerade’s meaning in eighteenth-century
culture and society) (72). With regard to the cultural impact of mas­
querade, Castle indicates that different kinds of costumes disrupted
different kinds of traditional dichotomies or social divisions. For
example, foreign costume disturbed the distinction between Europe
and the Orient and the light versus the dark races. Occupational cos­
tumes destroyed the division between masters and servants, and
transvestite masquerades overthrew the opposition between mascu­
line and feminine. In other words, “[t]he potent transformations of
the masquerade implicitly challenged those hierarchical valuations
built into a system of cultural oppositions” (78).
After studying masquerade/Carnival’s subversive nature, Castle
analyzes the demise of public masquerade in England after the eigh­
teenth century. Citing Mikhail Bakhtin’s link between the “rise of
rational epistemologies” during the nineteenth century and the demise

of gender and sexuality. Finally, I will trace the roots of the connec­
tion between masquerade and social justice that I establish here to
the practice of Carnival celebrations and the figure of the comic
book superhero.
The social practices of masquerade and disguise and their corre­
sponding motif in fictional narrative are broad topics that have been
studied in varying degrees in different countries with regard to their
customs and literary works. Most material on the subject relates to
England and Russia, with select texts that examine the topic in Africa,
France, and Latin America. Given the impossibility of discussing the
topic of masquerade worldwide, below is a brief overview of some of
the most important and pertinent books and book collections on the
topic.
Little has been written about masquerade in the twentieth- and
twenty-first-century novel. Most books on masquerade have focused
on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with an emphasis on mas­
querade in theatrical texts and performances. Lloyd Davies, in his
book Guise and Disguise: Rhetoric and Characterization in the
English Renaissance, published in 1993, examines literary texts from
the Renaissance (late fifteenth to early seventeenth century) in
England. Davies’s thesis is that during this time period, the motif of
masquerade is intertwined with character development, rendering the
motif “problematic, since either ‘ethos’ or ‘poiesis’ may determine its
meaning” (6). “Ethos” implies that a certain spirit or controlling force
is behind the character, while “poiesis” suggests that a character
undergoes a process of development and is free to form himself in any
direction. Thus, disguise makes character development more ambig­
uous because it presents “an opposition between essentialist [ethos]
and representational [poiesis] notions of selfhood” (6). Davies devel­
ops his idea of the link between character and masquerade, indicating
that there are three major functions of disguise: (i) disguise “fore­
grounds the interplay and conflicts between vision and language in
the production of self and persona... . Disguise depicts a semiotics of
characterization” (9); (2) disguise establishes hierarchies between pri­
mary, secondary, and other characters and reproduces the dialectic
between essentialist and nonessentialist character development; and
Masquerade and Literature
3
(3) disguise posits character development as a dialogic process
between the one who masquerades and other characters and thus
represents an ideology of characterization (9). Davies undertakes an
analysis of these three functions through an examination of pairs of
opposite figures in Renaissance literature: the king versus the courtier,
the subject versus the traitor, and man versus woman. According to
Davies, these pairings allow literary works to treat political, sexual,
and subversive topics (ii).
Another pioneering book on masquerade is Terry Castle’s Mas­
querade and Civilization: The Carnivalesque in Eighteenth-Century
English Culture and Fiction (1987). Castle’s history explores numer­
ous aspects of masquerade balls and Carnival, including masquerade
as a “kind of collective mediation on self and other, and an explora­
tion of this mysterious dialectic” (4). Moreover, Castle emphasizes
how masquerade enacted a “reversal of ordinary sexual, social and
metaphysical hierarchies. The cardinal ideological distinctions under­
lying eighteenth-century cultural life, including fundamental distinc­
tions of sex and class, were breached” (6). Castle stresses that these
two aspects of masquerade (the questions of identity and equality)
respectively reflect interpretation of the phenomenon on two levels:
the psychological (the meaning of masquerade to the individual) and
the anthropological (masquerade’s meaning in eighteenth-century
culture and society) (72). With regard to the cultural impact of mas­
querade, Castle indicates that different kinds of costumes disrupted
different kinds of traditional dichotomies or social divisions. For
example, foreign costume disturbed the distinction between Europe
and the Orient and the light versus the dark races. Occupational cos­
tumes destroyed the division between masters and servants, and
transvestite masquerades overthrew the opposition between mascu­
line and feminine. In other words, “[t]he potent transformations of
the masquerade implicitly challenged those hierarchical valuations
built into a system of cultural oppositions” (78).
After studying masquerade/Carnival’s subversive nature, Castle
analyzes the demise of public masquerade in England after the eigh­
teenth century. Citing Mikhail Bakhtin’s link between the “rise of
rational epistemologies” during the nineteenth century and the demise
4 Introdyction
of Carnival, Castle explains that with the advent of advanced civili­
zation, collective activities such as Carnival were replaced by “games
of competitive struggle or chance” that are associated more with the
individual than the collectivity (102).
In the second half of Masquerade and Civilization, Castle empha­
sizes the decline of this motif in English literature of the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries, which is seen as a result of masquerade’s dis­
appearance from the cultural scene. Castle asserts that “[t]he carniva-
lesque has lost virtually all immediacy and power in twentieth-century
life” (105) and signals the difficulty of finding masquerade episodes in
nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature (338). Finally, she indi­
cates that in the twentieth century, the masquerade motif can only be
found in minor subgenres such as Harlequin romances and detective
novels (341).
Castle’s observations have important repercussions for my study of
masquerade in Latin American literature. First, her emphasis on the
anthropological aspect of masquerade, the element of social equality
inherent in Carnival, is an important precursor to the relationship
between masquerade and social justice developed in twentieth- and
twenty-first-century Latin American fiction. Second, although her
insistence on the disappearance of the motif in English literature may
well be accurate, we can observe the antithesis in contemporary Latin
American literature, where the motifs of masquerade and disguise are
pervasive. Castle’s book is not only an important introduction to the
concept of the socially subversive quality of masquerade but also a
significant counterpoint to the theme in Latin American literature,
where the motif is monumentally different in its development from
that in other countries.'
Catherine Craft-Fairchild’s Masquerade and Gender: Disguise and
Female Identity in Eighteenth-Century Fictions by Women (1993)
takes an opposing stance to Castle’s landmark book. Craft-Fairchild
deals only with female masquerade and argues that “masquerade con­
formed to patriarchal structures” and led to “more sophisticated
forms of oppression” (3). She claims that the writers studied in her
book (Aphra Behn, Mary Davys, Eliza Haywood, Elizabeth Inchbald,
and Frances Burney) “recreate and thereby promote ideologies of
Masquerade and Literature 5
female subordination within their works” (22). Finally, she argues
that these writers both “construct and deconstruct ideologies of
female identity” (22). Thus, Craft-Fairchild connects masquerade to
both female oppression and identity.
Just as masquerade balls were an important cultural activity in
eighteenth-century England, such masquerades were popular in late
nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century Russia. This is the
topic of Colleen McQuillen’s The Modernist Masquerade: Stylizing
Life, Literature, and Costumes in Russia (2013). McQuillen, like Cas­
tle, stresses the important difference between the eighteenth and nine­
teenth centuries, noting that in the former century, masquerade was
an occasion for anonymity (and thus equality), while in the latter,
modernist era, masquerade was a form of individual personal expres­
sion. Much like Craft-Fairchild, McQuillen ties masquerade to the
concept of identity, noting that “the social practices and artistic rep­
resentations of costume balls reflected the evolution of identity from
an essentialist trait to a fluid construct during the final days of tsarist
Russia” (6). According to the author, masks signified a reconfigura­
tion of one’s relationship to the public sphere and thus led to “a new
found sense of political and artistic agency” (6). In other words,
although McQuillen focuses on the concept of identity and its rela­
tionship to masquerade, larger questions of political power and influ­
ence that are also related to the act of masquerading are also studied.
The strength of this book is that McQuillen, like Castle, examines
masquerade both as a sociocultural phenomenon and a literary motif.
McQuillen summarizes her findings thus:
The evolution of masquerade practices and imagery over the
years that bridge the nineteenth and twentieth centuries illumi­
nates the changing aesthetic priorities and the political tensions
that defined late Imperial Russia. In particular, the masquerade
motif in Russian modernism points out how the destabilization of
essentialist paradigms of social identity and the consequent privi­
leging of subjectivity ramified in the literary, visual and perform­
ing arts as well as in the emergent field of fashion design. It also
foregrounds performative strategies for wielding political agency
lllli
6 Introduction
that the monarchy and its challengers used, such as wearing a
national costume and manipulating national identity. (2.05)
Masquerade in nineteenth-century literature is also the main focus
of Fran^oise Ghillebaert’s Disguise in George Sand’s Novels (2009).
Ghillebaert offers us a glimpse into masquerade in French literature.
Her study resembles those of Craft-Fairchild, McQuillen, and even
Davies, in the sense that she focuses on the relationship between mas­
querade and identity (which is linked to character evolution). Ghille­
baert posits that cross-dressing in Sand’s works “allows heroes to
experience both feminine and masculine traits in their original and
constructed identities in order to find a balance between the two and
hence proceed with their objectives” (4). Disguise “is used to reinforce
the heroine’s existing feminine identities and is linked to the birth of
a new type of independent and self-assertive female protagonist” (9).
Ghillebaert hypothesizes that disguise helps to bring to the fore traits
in the female characters that would otherwise not have been disclosed
(10). Thus, the author emphasizes the “psychological and spiritual
function of disguise” (10) rather than gender per se as the focus of her
study.
A very recent collection of essays on masquerade titled Masquer­
ade: Essays on Tradition and Innovation Worldwide (2015), edited by
Deborah Bell, is one of the few studies available on masquerade in the
twentieth and twenty-first centuries.^ In her introduction to the col­
lection, Bell stresses a more modern interpretation of forms of mas­
querade that includes masquerade in art forms other than literature,
such as photography, fashion, music, and film, among other media
(3). Bell points out that there has been an explosion of masquerade as
a result of the Information Age, which has provided us with a wealth
of imagery, and that thus the contemporary era could well be consid­
ered “the age of Masquerade” (3). Bell’s study does not include liter­
ary texts hut rather a multitude of cultural phenomena in different
countries.
Bell makes a striking connection between masquerade and heroism
in her article. She states that the democratization of masquerade
“encourages each of us to imagine ourselves as heroes, artists, and
Masquerade and Literature
magicians” and that current masquerades “champion heroic qualities
of down-to-earth fictional characters like Harry Potter” (8). Thus,
Bell connects the concept of masquerade to heroism, which is a pre­
cursor to its association with the fight for social justice. We will revisit
this connection below with regard to the link between comic book
superheroes and social justice.
Other important articles in Bell’s collection establish a relationship
between social protest (the fight for social justice) and masquerade,
notably “Behind the Mask: Guerrilla Girls and Others Exposing
Unfair Practices and Voicing Protest” by Mary Robinson. Robinson
studies groups who have adopted masquerade “as an effective tool for
protest and reform” (56), focusing mainly on the Guerrilla Girls but
also mentioning numerous other groups such as the Zapatistas in
Mexico and Pussy Riot in Russia. According to Robinson, “[e]ach
mask style [of these groups] . . . symbolizes intent. While the mask is
worn to fight a cause, it also serves to visually represent that very
cause. Consequently, masquerade allows for reaction and resistance.
... As visual signifiers of the problem, the symbolism helps compel
people to think” (160-63).
Robinson also analyzes the use of masquerade in the graphic
novel V for Vendetta by Alan Moore and David Lloyd, noting how
masquerade has transformed from safety valve in eighteenth-century
society to a revolutionary, subversive political force in contemporary
society (167). Thus, Robinson, like Bell, implies a possible connec­
tion between masquerade and the fight for social justice. Bell’s col­
lection contains many other interesting articles, but these are the
ones most pertinent to this study.
In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, much has been written
about a particular form of masquerade in Latin America—transves­
tism. In addition to two landmark books on male transvestism—Ben
Sifuentes-Jauregui’s Transvestism, Masculinity, and Latin American
Literature (2002) and Vek Lewis’s Crossing Sex and Gender in Latin
America (2010), there is one on female cross-dressing: Del traves-
tismo femenino (2013) hy Jose Ismael Gutierrez. Numerous articles
have also considered the topic of cross-dressing in Latin America,
particularly male to female cross-dressing.
Introduction
Sifuentes-Jauregui’s book explores the theme of transvestism in
various literary texts, including those by Alejo Carpentier, Severo Sar-
duy, and Jose Donoso. Sifuentes’s book is about “sexualities and
queer subjectivities” (4). He examines the works of important Latin
American writers in terms of how transvestism relates to notions of
identity (self and other) and gender (the performance of what has
historically been termed “masculinity” and “femininity”). Sifuentes
writes that transvestism in Latin America is “inseparable from the
self-figuration of the homosexual” (7), and this “self-figuration” is
essentially the main focus of his study.
Similarly, Vek Lewis in Crossing Sex and Gender is concerned
with what he terms “nonnormative sexualities and genders in Latin
America,” which he studies in various literary and cinematic texts
produced between 1985 and 2.005. While Sifuentes focuses on writers
from the Latin American Boom period, Lewis examines works from
the subsequent time frame, which is “a period of cultural emergence
of sexual and gender minorities as distinct political identities” (8).
Lewis also emphasizes his concern with how these representations of
“locas,” “travestis,” and “transformistas” relates to social realities in
Latin America. He relates all of the works analyzed in his study to the
political effects of the presence or absence of subjectivity for transves­
tite figures.
I have chosen to omit male transvestism from the present study
because there is already a considerable body of work on this topic in
Latin American cultural studies and literary criticism and because
this specialized form of masquerade fulfills unique functions different
from what we will describe in the rest of Latin American literature.
The books by Sifuentes and Lewis are masquerade studies that focus
on identity and gender, and thus clearly take a different approach to
the topic of disguise than the present study. Nonetheless, I believe that
if the arguments in these books were taken one step further, they
would actually imply a fight for social justice (social and political
equality) that is achieved through the masquerade of locas, trans­
formistas, and travestis.
Female transvestism in Latin America has been studied in numer­
ous articles, as well as in the abovementioned Del travestismo
Masquerade and Literature
femenino by Gutierrez, but it is by no means as popular a topic as
male transvestism. Gutierrez’s book may be the only full-length study
of the topic, in which he focuses on four novels: Hija de la fortuna
(Daughter of Fortune) (1999) by Isabel Allende, Mujer en traje de
batalla (Woman in Battle Dress) (zooi) by Antonio Benitez-Rojo,
Lobas del mar (Sea Wolves) (2008) by Zoe Valdes, and Historia del
rey transparente (Story of the Transparent King) (2014) by Rosa
Montero, who is actually a Spanish (not Latin American) novelist.
Gutierrez, like Sifuentes and Lewis, approaches the topic through the
lenses of gender and queer theory, citing such theorists as Judith But­
ler, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Linda Garber, and Jack Halberstam as
his inspiration. More than half of Gutierrez’s text is dedicated to dis­
cussing the concept of transvestism and establishing its typology. He
divides transvestism into different modes: religious, recreational,
erotic, and so forth. Gutierrez arrives at many of the same conclusions
as his predecessors: that transvestism disrupts the gender dichotomy
male/female, and that female transvestism in particular is a form of
fesistance against patriarchy (33-82).
In the second half of the book, Gutierrez offers textual analysis of
the four aforementioned novels. His approach to Hija de la fortuna
turns on the now familiar link between masquerade and identity.
Masquerade is conceived as a means by which the protagonist, Eliza
Sommers, defines her ultimate identity: “Mas que desechar de piano
su identidad de mujer, lo que hara el personaje femenino es apropiarse
de una idea entonces inedita de lo que deberfa ser una mujer. ... La
mujer que descubre y define Elias/Eliza no es otra que la New Woman
que reivindica sus derechos que se incorpora al mundo laboral, que
no ejerce de sierva de su marido” (Rather than flatly disregarding her
identity as a woman, what the feminine character will do is enact an
atypical idea of what a woman should be like. . . . The woman that
Elias/Eliza discovers and defines is none other than the New Woman
who vindicates her rights, who incorporates herself into the work
force, and who is not a servant to her husband) (174) (my translation).
Gutierrez’s analysis of Mujer en traje de batalla takes two funda­
mental directions. The first is an interpretation of Henriette Faber, the
novel’s protagonist, as an example of neofeminist thought, whose
lO Introduction
masquerade “intenta deslegitimar el orden social y juridico” (attempts
to delegitimize the social and juridical order) (179). Gutierrez hints
here at a possible link between masquerade and the fight for social
justice but does not develop this thought, rather focusing on Henri-
ette’s masquerade as a feminist strategy that allows her to do what
men do. Gutierrez’s second direction concentrates on a link between
masquerade and Cuban culture. He views disguise as a cultural symp­
tom, citing James Pancrazio’s idea that “el motivo de la mascara, el
simulacro y el artificio siempre han formado parte del debate sobre la
cultura cubana” (the motif of the mask, the simulacrum, and the
artifice have always formed part of the debate on Cuban culture) (193)
(my translation). Gutierrez argues that Henriette’s successive disguises
reflect “ese gusto tropicalista por el transformismo” (that tropical
taste for transmutation) (194).
Gutierrez’s analyses of these two texts are of particular interest for
the present book, which also examines Hija de la fortuna and Mujer
en traje de batalla from a feminist perspective. However, I will focus
on how these novels attempt to achieve a form of postmodern feminist
justice rather than on notions of gender, female, and cultural identity.
One other book dedicated to the topic of masquerade in Latin
American literature is Brent Carbajal’s The Veracity of Disguise in
Selected Works of Jose Donoso: Illusory Deception (2000). Unlike
the other studies on Latin American masquerade, Carbajal’s book
does not deal with the theme of transvestism (although this is present
in such novels as El lugar sin Itmites [Hell Has No Limits]) but other
types of disguise in Donoso’s El obsceno pdjaro de la noche (The
Obscene Bird of Night), Casa de campo (House in the Country), El
jardtn de a lado (The Garden Next Door), and Donde van a morir los
elefantes (Where Elephants Go to Die). All of these novels are dis­
cussed as examples of the basic premise that Donoso paradoxically
employs masquerade to reveal the truth in his fiction.
As the above overview illustrates, most of the previous work on mas­
querade focuses on the relationship between disguise and identity, char­
acterization, or gender. With regard to Latin American literature,
transvestism in particular is the only topic that has been explored,
other than the work of a specific author (Jose Donoso). This volume.
Masquerade and Literature ii
Masquerade and Social Justice in Contemporary Latin American Fic­
tion, approaches the theme of disguise in an entirely new manner.
Through the examination of a variety of twentieth- and twenty-first-
century Latin American novels (ranging from 1964 through 2009), this
book explores the link between disguised characters and the fight for
social justice, understood in a variety of forms (elaborated below), in
Latin America.
Carnival in Latin America
Before outlining the distinct forms of social justice that are developed
in the contemporary Latin American novel, we must examine the
roots of this relationship in two important phenomena: the practice
of Carnival celebrations and the figure of the comic book superhero.
These are two media that connect the motif of masquerade to the
concept of justice, and which I posit have influenced the representa­
tion of this connection in Latin American literature of the current and
past centuries.
We have already noted how Terry Castle associated Carnival cel­
ebrations with social equality in her book Masquerade and Civiliza­
tion. In addition to Castle’s observations, the Russian critic Mikhail
Bakhtin explores this relationship in his landmark book Rabelais
and His World. In this important piece of literary criticism, Bakhtin
studies folk culture and its impact on Rabelais’s writings. Bakhtin
identifies Carnival festivities as a key element of folk culture during
medieval times. In strict, hierarchical medieval society. Carnival was
a vehicle of temporary freedom and equality for the masses. Bakhtin
repeatedly emphasizes this connection between equality and Carni­
val in his study, stating that “[o]nly in the Carnival... the people ...
entered the Utopian realm of community freedom, equality and
abundance” (8-9).
Carnival is an important festival in Latin America, especially Brazil,
Mexico, and Cuba. In her article “Colliding Cultures in the Carnival
of Cuba and the Philippines,” Laura Crow describes how Carnival has
been associated with social freedom and revolution (social equality) in
the history of Cuba. In the seventeenth century, when slaves in Cuba
were granted liberty to celebrate Carnival in the streets, this festivity
IZ
began with wealthy landowners in Santiago carrying the effigy of Saint
James through the streets on their way to the cathedral to celebrate
Mass. Their slaves followed behind them, singing and dancing. How­
ever, eventually, the slaves began to wear their masters’ cast-off cloth­
ing, a form of masquerade, and led the parade down the street. Thus,
the divisions between the rich landowners and slaves were temporarily
obscured (Crow 65-67).
Crow also describes two contemporary Cuban Carnival celebrations
that are linked to Fidel Castro’s revolution for social and economic
equality. The first began to celebrate the departure of Fulgencio Batista
in 1959. The second commemorates Castro’s July 26 revolution in San­
tiago. According to Crow:
The parades in Santiago de Cuba are complete with white wigged
Granmas and Granpas who represent the cabin cruiser named
Granma that brought Fidel Castro, Raul Castro and Che Gue­
vara among 82 revolutionaries from Tuxpan, Veracruz in Mexico
two years after the 26th of July attack. . . . Those white wigged
“Granmas” and “Granpas” are a mainstay of the celebration.
They represent not only the revolution, but also the slaves wear­
ing hand-me-down clothes and white wigs from their i8th cen­
tury masters. (65)
Thus, masquerade (both the seventeenth-century adoption of the
role/identity of the landowners by the slaves, and the contemporary
disguise as “Granmas” and “Granpas” wearing white wigs) links
disguise to social equality (both through the equality of slaves and
masters in the seventeenth-century celebration and the social equal­
ity aspired to by Castro’s revolution in the contemporary Carnival
activities).
Similarly, in “Fiestas, Dances and Masks of Mexico: Community
Masquerade and Ritual Art,” Marta Turok examines the use of
masquerade by indigenous groups of the preconquest. Turok notes
that mask wearing was a widespread practice whose function was
not always clear. She identifies eight different categories of masquer­
ade dance, among which figure dances during Carnival. According
to Turok, these dances fostered role reversal: “The 365 day solar
Masquerade and Literature 13
calendar was divided into eighteen months and twenty days and the
last five were the ‘lost days’ where the reversal of roles and order
marked the beginning of the solar cults, a festivity that paralleled
European Carnival in time, but not meaning” (95). Carnival role
reversal, as we have already seen in the Cuban case, implies a level­
ing of differences and a temporary social equality between different
groups of the social hierarchy. Moreover, Turok also discusses that
in addition, there were “dances of the Conquest” and “historical
events celebrated by dances,” each of which also involved an equal­
izing role reversal. Although the Conquest dances, such as the dance
of Moors and Christians, served to remind the local population that
they had been conquered, in reality “the masks and their wearers
would turn history upside down and the vanquished would have the
last word—and in a sense revenge the conquerors and other exploit­
ers by means of satire and mockery” (95). In a similar vein, the
historical dances by the Mexicans and Indians transform exploit­
ative and difficult historical events “into forms of mocking the land­
lords that kept them in virtual slavery” (95).
As the Cuban and Mexican examples show, there is a history in
Latin America of carnivalesque celebrations that offer a temporary
social equality to their participants. Thus, a connection is estab­
lished through these events between social equality (justice) and
masquerade.
Latin America and the Superhero
Understanding the genesis of the relationship between masquerade
and social justice also requires us to consider comic book superheroes
who fight for social justice. Superheroes traditionally have a secret
identity and thus wear masks and costumes that disguise their true
selves. In some cases, when there is no secret identity, they wear spe­
cial costumes that to some degree serve the same purpose as masquer­
ade. Thus, superheroes connect the themes of masquerade and justice
in ways that prefigure this association in the Latin American novel.
The classic superhero model derives from the figure of Superman
and thus from comic strips in the United States. According to Ron
Naverson: “Contemporary America’s most prevalent exposure to

masks and masquerades is in the form of fictional superheroes. The
appearance of Superman in Action Comics spawned a wave of cos­
tumed mystery men, women, children (even pets) as gaudily clad,
masked defenders of the weak and oppressed” (ziy). The imitation of
the US superhero by Latin American cartoonists is complex. Some
comic strips clearly model themselves on Superman (such as Kalimdn
and Fantomas in Mexico),’ while others implicitly reject what this
model represents through parody (e.g., Fantomas contra los vampiros
multinacionales by Julio Cortazar and the Mexican strip El Bulbo).
The parodic comic strips are a reaction to the ideology behind the
Superman (and other superhero) comic strips. Bruce Campbell notes
that during World War II, there was a shift in the representation of
the Superman figure from “iconoclast individualistic liberal reformer
to mainstream liberal organizational man” (190). In other words,
Superman came to represent a “status quo vision of modernity,” of
“the American Way” and “capitalist democracy” (Campbell 190).
Moreover, the parodic comic strips rebel against the US culture of
mass consumerism, or what Campbell terms “free market globaliza­
tion as a corrosive force” (192).
Whether the Latin American comic strip furthers the US superhero
vision or controverts it is to some degree irrelevant for the topic at
hand. In either case, the reader is presented with an elaborately cos­
tumed or disguised superhero (his true or other identity hidden
through masquerade) who is associated with some form of justice.
The main difference between the traditional heroes and the parodic
heroes is that figures like Kaliman and Fantomas normally fight
against criminals and thus achieve a form of criminal justice, whereas
the parodic heroes fight other types of injustice, such as corporate
imperialism (in Cortazar’s version of Fantomas) or cultural injustice
(the effects of globalized mass culture) in El Bulbo.
The discussion of comic strips is relevant insofar as they relate to
literary works. I will briefly trace how disguise links to social justice
in the stories of the two aforementioned parodic superhero strips:
Cortazar’s Fantomas (1975) and the more recent El Bulbo (zooo-
2001). In Fantomas contra los vampiros multinacionales (Fantomas
against the Multinational Vampires), books are being globally
Masquerade and Literature 15
destroyed and famous intellectuals (Cortazar, Susan Sontag, Gabriel
Garda Marquez) attempt to get to the bottom of the crime. Fantomas
is called to the scene, but his individualistic efforts to punish those
guilty of the crime are unsuccessful for two reasons that are clearly
spelled out by the Susan Sontag character. First, Sontag indicates that
the real crime is not the destruction of the books but other global
issues such as mass hunger from which the book burning has dis­
tracted Fantomas. Second, Sontag criticizes the ability of any one
person, even a superhero like Fantomas, to bring justice to world. She
states:
Fantomas es admirable y se juega la vida a cada paso, pero nunca
le va a entrar en la cabeza que los otros son legion y que sola-
mente con otras legiones se les puede hacer frente y vencerlos.
Ademas, Fantomas es un justiciero solitario, si no fuera asi nadie
le dibujaria las historietas te das cuenta. No tiene vocacion de
lider, nunca sera un jefe de hombres.
(Fantomas is admirable and risks his life at every step, but he is
never going to get it into his head that the others form a legion
and that only with other legions can we face and conquer them.
Moreover, Fantomas is a solitary avenger; if it were not that way
no one would draw his comic strips, you realize. He doesn’t have
the vocation of a leader, he will never be the boss of men.) (57)
(my translation)
Cortazar’s comic book suggests that social justice is a collective
endeavor, and thus, to a certain degree, Fantomas, although a figure
associated with justice, is a failed superhero. Although his disguises
(he masquerades, among other things, as a paralytic to gain entry to
the board meeting of the Kennecot Corporation) aid in his fight for
justice, ultimately this justice is not achieved in Fantomas contra los
vampiros multinacionales.
El Bulbo (The Bulb), a comic strip by Sebastian Carrillo, reinforces
the connection between justice and the superhero through its parody
of the superhero figure. The character El Bulbo is essentially a TV
tube that comes to life and acquires superhuman powers. However,
El Bulbo’s supernatural abilities are tempered by his daily, real-life
i6
trials, such as his inability to earn a decent living as a superhero. Car­
rillo uses his comic strip to criticize elements of globalization and
commercialization in contemporary society. His mix of the mundane
and the extraordinary result in a comical interpretation of the super­
hero that is frequently reinforced through El Bulbo’s various disguises.
Nonetheless, whenever El Bulbo disguises himself, whether as a secret
detective or by acquiring hair and a different color to upgrade his
public image, he simultaneously achieves justice in these superhero
episodes.
In the collection of strips (gathered into a graphic novel) titled El
Bulbo Bipolar, two episodes stand out in this regard. The first is
“DET: Detective Experto en Todo,” in which El Bulbo dons the clas­
sic outfit of the American detective: a trench coat and wide-brimmed
hat. El Bulbo employs this disguise to earn money, since he cannot do
so in his superhero capacity. Using the detective disguise, El Bulbo
proceeds to solve a murder that takes place in the circus. The bullet
swallower is killed by a bullet that he should have been able to inter­
cept by swallowing but failed to do so. El Bulbo discovers that the
killer, the circus owner who is in love with the bullet swallower’s wife,
drew a tortoise on the bullet, causing it to move more slowly than a
normal bullet. This magic trick resulted in the miscalculation by the
bullet swallower that caused his death. The episode is comical, but
criminal justice is achieved through El Bulbo’s actions in disguise.
Carrillo parodies detective fiction as a commercialized popular genre.
A second episode in which disguise is important revolves around
El Bulbo’s attempts to earn money as a superhero. He hires an agent
who insists on giving El Bulbo a makeover to improve his image. He
provides hair in the form of a mop and gives him a red suit to cover
his yellow skin (which to the agent suggests hepatitis). Then the agent
makes El Bulbo charge fifty dollars for his superhero services when
he is called upon to save the city’s historic district from destruction
by a gigantic woman who is hanging from the top of a tower. When
El Bulbo arrives on the scene, he is laughed at for his “disguise.”
Nonetheless, dressed in this ridiculous manner, El Bulbo solves the
problem, determining that the woman grew in size when she was
revived by emergency workers who activated her diet pills in the
Masquerade and Literature
wrong direction (making her grow bigger rather than smaller). He
reverses the process and removes her from the tower. At the episode’s
end, the commercialization of society is criticized and rejected when
El Bulbo discovers that his entire paycheck must go to the agent,
whom he ultimately has arrested and sent off in a police car. Although
El Bulbo, like Fantomas contra los vampiros multinacionales, cri­
tiques the role of the superhero (as a commercialized figure), in this
process it reinforces the traditional inherent connection between the
superhero and social justice.
This connection between the superhero and justice is pervasive and
has its roots in philosophical thought. According to Jeff Brenzel in
“Why Are Superheroes Good?,” the teachings of Plato and Aristotle
illustrate that moral goodness and the desire for justice are not the
result of the fear of punishment but rather the recognition that people
cannot abandon “good health in the soul” and seek the common good
because they are rational beings who recognize the need for “virtue
ethics” (158). Brenzel claims with regard to superheroes that “their
unusual powers simply make it less possible for superheroes to duck
the questions we all need to face about our role and potential goals in
life. . . . Great superhero stories are therefore riddled with personal
quests to determine how a person can best live with great powers”
(158). In “Heroes and Superheroes,” Jeph Loeb and Tom Morris add:
“The depiction of the heroic in superhero stories is of moral force.
. .. Superman gives us an ongoing example of what a commitment to
truth, justice and not just the American way but the genuinely human
way should look like. Many other superheroes show us as well” (16).
As this brief introduction to the topic of masquerade illustrates,
previous work has largely focused on issues of identity, characteriza­
tion, gender, and male/female cross-dressing. To a large degree, these
aspects of masquerade are intertwined. Only in discussions of the role
of Carnival in medieval times through the eighteenth century and
with regard to superheroes has justice previously been linked to the
masquerade motif. To address this absence, each chapter of this book
focuses on a distinct type of justice achieved or alluded to through the
use of disguise in various Latin American novels from the late twen­
tieth and early twenty-first centuries. I illustrate how disguise is
i8
frequently motivated by psychological disorder that occurs as a reac­
tion to abuse, depression, social stigma, trauma, dictatorship, or
bearing witness to torture and political murder. Through this impor­
tant connection between disguise and the fight for social justice in
Latin America, I illustrate how masquerade disguises the true histor­
ical character of the contemporary Latin American novel.
Overview of the Book
Chapter i, “Disguise and Distributive Justice: La comparsa by Sergio
Galindo, and El paratso en la otra esquina and Travesuras de la nina
mala by Mario Vargas Llosa,” examines the way in which distributive
justice models (e.g., those of Karl Marx and John Rawls) underlie
these narratives and are brought to the fore through the various dis­
guises of the characters. Distributive justice is defined as equity or
fairness in the sharing of the benefits and burdens (especially the eco­
nomic ones) of society. The chapter examines the application of John
Rawls’s concept of “original position” during the Carnival celebration
in Galindo’s La comparsa (Mexican Masquerade). “Original posi­
tion” is the notion that if one does not know the position he or she
should occupy in society, one would be able to adopt a totally impar­
tial viewpoint with regard to reasoning about principles of justice.
' Galindo’s novel functions as an early precursor (1964) to the topic,
employing the Carnival motif to expose the lack of social equality in
Mexico and alluding to important historical events in the fight for
social justice, such as the Cuban revolution and the Mexican Gasca
rebellion. Vargas Llosa’s El paratso en la otra esquina (The Way to
Paradise; 2003) is a historical novel that recreates the figure of Flora
Tristan, who fought for workers’ and women’s rights in the early nine­
teenth century and whose ideas prefigured those of Marx. The novel
reinforces a Marxian socialist model based on the transformation of
the prevailing capitalist mode of society, in which the workers are
unionized and receive the same benefits as everyone else. In addition,
three years later, Travesuras de la nina mala (The Bad Girl; 2006),
Vargas Llosa’s alleged love story about a poor Peruvian woman, is
actually an overview of social injustice in Peruvian history that is
brought to light precisely through the protagonists’ various roles and
Masquerade and Literature 19
masquerades. The so-called bad girl (Lily/Otilia) adopts these dis­
guises precisely to climb the social and economic ladder and escape
her impoverished origins.
Chapter 2, “Postmodern Justice: Ethical Feminism in Isabel Allen-
de’s Hija de la fortuna, Antonio Benftez-Rojo’s Mujer en traje de
batalla, Marcela Serrano’s Nuestra sehora de la soledad, and Sara
Sefchovich’s La senora de los suenos” explores the question of justice
for women in the postmodern era. The chapter examines two primary
and opposing models of feminist justice known as the Portia and
Persephone models (Heidensohn 293). The Portia model stresses that
women should have rights that are exactly equal to those of men,
while the Persephone model suggests that women are different from
men and should thus have rights that are equivalent, but not necessar­
ily identical to those of men. I explore the notion of women’s differ­
ence as one of socialization, not essence. Using the ideas of the leading
feminist justice theorist Drucilla Cornell and the concept of ethical
feminism as a form of universal justice outlined by the psychologist
Carol Gilligan, I examine how women’s masquerade is employed to
achieve ethical feminist justice in four very different novels by both
male and female writers. Cornell argues that speaking of “the femi­
nine” in a metaphorical sense does not reduce all women to the same
condition in an essentialist manner, thereby bridging the gap between
postmodern and cultural feminists. Cornell endorses the concept of
feminine difference, a concept that Gilligan takes one step further,
illustrating that women are not born different but rather are social­
ized differently than men, leading to a stronger upholding of ethical
humanitarian principles in women. Gilligan then proposes these eth­
ical humanitarian principles as a model of social justice for all.
Chapter 3, “Postcolonial Structural Justice: Isabel Allende’s Zorro
and Carmen Boullosa’s Duerme” examines the concept of postcolo­
nial justice as a structural issue. In other words, there are currently
inequities in Latin American countries that arise from the structural
inequities inherent in the process of colonization that characterizes
Latin America. Using the ideas of Catherine Lu and Iris Marion
Young, I explore how the novels Zorro (2006) and Duerme (Sleep;
1993) expose the marginalization and exploitation of the indigenous

populations of Latin America as a result of colonization by the Span­
ish, and combat such unfair treatment by seeking postcolonial justice
through the masquerade of their respective protagonists. In particu­
lar, I apply Young’s idea that structural injustice is caused by domi­
nation and oppression, which result in five potential injustices:
exploitation, marginalization, powerlessness, cultural imperialism,
and violence. Such effects can be observed in both Zorro and Duerme.
Chapter 4, “Allegories of Transitional Justice: Masquerade in
Novela negra con argentinos by Luisa Valenzuela and Mascara by
Ariel Dorfman,” examines the concept of transitional justice (the
transition from authoritarian governments to democratic ones) by
novelists in two of the countries that went through this process in the
1980s and 1990S (Argentina and Chile, respectively). Valenzuela’s
novel was published a few years after Argentina’s democratic transi­
tion (1990), which followed the country’s “dirty war” (1976-1983),
while Dorfman’s novel was published just before Augusto Pinochet’s
exit (1988), after a military dictatorship of seventeen years. However,
both texts reflect on the dilemma implied by the choice between pun­
ishment and forgiveness of the officials of repressive governments in
the transition to liberalizing regimes. They also consider issues of
collective memory and collective amnesia of violent events through
the use of allegorical structures, which I examine using Angus Fletch­
er’s theory in Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode. Both texts
employ masquerade as a motif that aids in the contemplation of how
transitional justice can be achieved during difficult historical
moments.
Chapter 5, “Historical Justice: Masquerade and Trauma in Augusto
Roa Bastos’s El fiscal, Mayra Santos-Febres’s Fe en disfraz, and Fer­
nando del Paso’s Noticias del imperio,” examines how these three
novels attempt to achieve historical justice by filling in the gaps of
official histories through an analysis of the trauma experienced by
their protagonists. Ron Eyerman defines three types of trauma useful
for this analysis: personal, cultural, and national. In El fiscal, the
protagonist has been tortured during the Alfredo Stroessner dictator­
ship in Paraguay and goes into exile in France with a new identity. He
eventually decides to return to Paraguay to assassinate the dictator.
Masquerade and Literature 2.1
thus illustrating how a form of personal trauma (his previous torture)
results in an attempt to achieve historical justice. In Fe en disfraz, the
protagonist, Fe Verdejo, suffers the historical trauma of slavery by
donning the dress of the ex-slave woman, Xica da Silva. She suffers
from both personal trauma (she was raped) and cultural trauma (the
historical enslavement of blacks), while her lover, Martin, who does
not belong to the traumatized group, illustrates how other members
of society can internalize cultural trauma so that it extends to the
nation as a whole (and becomes a national trauma). Finally, in Noti­
cias del imperio, Del Paso examines the perpetrator trauma suffered
by Maximilian and Carlota. As the foreign-born monarchs imposed
on Mexico after the French invasion in 1861, these figures are the
perpetrators of the deaths of many Mexicans, but at the same time
they attempt to identify with the country, become Mexicans, and thus
suffer for the crimes they committed. The rather complex vision that
the author presents of these two historical figures is an attempt to
achieve a form of historical justice, as are the filling in of gaps in the
historical record with regard to the Stroessner dictatorship in Roa
Bastos’s novel and the female slave testimonies presented in Santos-
Febres’s Fe en disfraz.
The conclusion, “Why Study Masquerade?,” unifies my analysis,
delving into the relationship between masquerade, social justice, and
the genre of the historical novel in Latin America. It illustrates how
the literary motif of masquerade ultimately serves as a “disguise” for
historical novels. These novels superficially appear to belong to the
romance novel, detective fiction, or other genres, but through their
association with social justice are ultimately historical in nature. The
conclusion also explores the relationship between novelistic charac­
ters who are authors and their connection to the potential influence
of the writer to effect social change by motivating readers to action.