title: Can Literature Promote Justice?: Trauma Narrative and Social Action in Latin American Testimonio
author:  Kimberly A. Nance 
description: Kimberly A. Nance is Associate Professor of Spanish and Chair of the Department of Foreign Languages at Illinois State University.
zlib_text: The Pelcari Project is a ... parable about an ingenious experi­
  ment in political indoctrination somewhere in Central America. 
  It 
  is simultaneously more explicit and more rigorously mathematical 
  than Hey Rosa's earlier nightmarish tales of ritual ,·iolencc and 
  unhinged consciousness. It is as much concerned with the nature 
  of language as with the possibility of the ernasculat ion of indepen­
  dent thought by a repressive undemocratic regime . . . .  At the 
  heart of the tale is a literary puzzle which reinforces the impor­
  tance that writing assumes in resisting state violence .... Hey 
  Rosa suggests literature's abject fate in a totalitarian society, where 
  even the most radically independent style can be disarmed and re­
  employed .... [he] seems to share [Darlo's] faith in the liberating 
  power of literature, however muted by the experience of exile and 
  the resurgence of extreme violence in Guatemala. 
  -Erica Segre/The Times Literwy Supplement 
  ... Rey Rosa, un escritor de una o