Karina d.R. Pe Benito4 LiteratureLatin American Literature1 March 2014History and Identity in Juan Gabriel Vsquezs The InformersIntroductionColombia today is oftentimes associated with its longstanding war on narcotics. While that remains as one of its pressing issues, Colombia like any other country, has a rich history. In the novel The Informers, Juan Gabriel Vsquez tackles a grey spot in the countrys historyone that concerns the combatting of Nazism in Post-World War II Colombia. Gabriel Santoro, the novels narrator with a knack to uncover intimate dramas, publishes A Life in Exile, a book based on the testimony of Sara Guterman, a Jewish-German immigrant. The book deals with 1940s Colombia, when many German immigrants who were suspected of being Nazis were blacklisted and persecuted. Those who helped the government capture these suspected Nazis were called informers. After his fathers death, Gabriel aims to write about the formers life and ends up finding secrets of his that changes how sees his father and a history he sought to uncover with his first book on Sara Guterman.Premise The past plays an important and unsettling role in the course of the novel. It shapes ones identity as it does the present. How the characters look at the past reflects two perspectivesfirst that of Gabriel Santoro the senior and orator, who looks to the past with regret and disdain, second, that of Sara Guterman, who looks back to her past as a pivotal part of her life. Gabriel Santoro, the son plays chronicler of the two lives and eventually shares their perspectives towards the past and changes how he relates to his father, his own self and that particular time in Colombia. The concept of identity in relation to history serves as an influential role to the novels charactersone that will be discussed in the study.

Theoretical FrameworkThe concept of identity in relation to history and the novels key characters, such as the two Gabriel Santoros and Sara Guterman will be analyzed using Stuart Halls Cultural Identity and Diaspora and Jan E. Stet and Peter J. Burkes Identity Theory and Social Identity Theory. Stuart Hall begins his essay by defining identity as something fluid, as a production which is always an ongoing process that stems from within us and not as we are represented. The person speaking as I must be thought of as one that is enunciated. This means that we write and speak from a particular place and time, from a history and a culture which is specific and what we say is, always in context or positioned (Hall 222). Hall presents two different ways of thinking about cultural identity. The first position defines cultural identity in referring to one, shared culture, and a collective of one true self which people with a shared history and ancestry have in common. Our cultural identities reflect our common historical experiences and shared cultural codes which provide us, as a united people with stable yet continuous frames of reference and meaning beneath the shifting categories of our actual history. This unity or sense of oneness serves as truth and essence as a people sharing this cultural identity (Hall 223).The second view of cultural identity sees it as a matter of becoming as well as of being. Cultural identity belongs to the future as much as to the past. It has histories and like everything else is, subject to constant change. Our identities are the names we give to the different ways we are positioned by, and situate ourselves within, the narratives of the past (Hall 225). The past continues to speak to us but no longer addresses us as a simple, factual past since it is always constructed through memory, fantasy, narrative and myth (226).Jan E. Stets and Peter J. Burke proposes to unite Social Identity and Identity Theory in order to see how the two help us towards a general theory of the self. In social identity theory, persons who are similar to the self are categorized with the self (in-group) and those who differ from the self (out-group). People derive their identity or sense of self largely from the social categories to which they belong. How a person relates to others is established but the sense of self always differs. In identity theory the source of an identity is the categorization of the self as an occupant of a role, similar to what Hall described as positioning.Review of Related LiteratureShari Stone-Mediatore in Postmoderism, Realism, and the Problem of Identity reviews the book, Reclaiming Identity as edited by Paula Moya and Michael Hames Garcia. Using the key points of the book, Stone-Mediatore explores how our claims about experience, memory, and identity a can be of truth-value even when they are governed by socially-produced conceptual frameworks (126). These frameworks are commonly referred to by critics as discourse but, in accordance to the authors of the book, is referred to as theory. Following a post-modernist approach, identity first possesses a component that the authors (Moya and Garcia) define as realour bodies and our locations in institutionally-maintained social hierarchies or positioning (132). Secondly, identity consists of a constructed component: ones theory-mediated interpretation of ones objective situation. To be specific, interpretations of identity contribute to our real situation inasmuch as they inform how people and institutions treat us (Stone-Mediatore 134).On the NovelMax Paul Friedman in his book Nazis and Good Neighbors: The United States Campaign against the Germans of Latin America in World War II provides a historical background on Latin Americas participation in World War II. In rounding up some of these German immigrants, families were destroyed and finances were spent by the government in housing these individuals. Many Germans who sought to escape Nazis and their infamous concentration camps soon found themselves in camps all throughout Latin America. Those who had been caught were suspected of being Nazi sympathizers. These illegal detentions were justified as a way of developing good relations with the United States of America. Of the many Latin American countries that participated, one of which was Colombia, where the novel The Informers was set. As pointed out in the novel, not all Germans were supportive of the Nazi regime, especially those who did not agree with the latters principles and stance on Germans or anyone of Jewish heritage or descent. In the novel, Jewish-German immigrants, the Gutermans were fortunate enough to have been able to start their lives anew in Colombia. The family hotel, Nueva Europa becomes the occasional place of exile for both Colombian nationals and that of other immigrants in the country.I am not skeptical by nature, nor am I nave, and I know very well the cheap tricks memory can avail itself of when it suits; at the same time, I know that the past is not stationary, nor is it fixed, in spite of the documentsit can take just a tiny detail, something that in the grand scheme of things we consider insignificant, to make a letter relating trivialities become something that determines our lives, to make the innocent man in the photo turn out to have always been our worst enemy (Vsquez 87).In the third part of the novel[footnoteRef:1], The Life According to Sara Guterman the younger Gabriel Santoro uncovers the bitter truth about his deceased fathers past, a history hidden from him ever since he had been a child. Gutermans narrative weaves the events leading to loss of Santoro Seniors hand and his involvement with the DeressersKonrad and his estranged son, Enrique. [1: The Informers is divided into four parts: Part I The Inadequate Life, Part II The Second Life, Part III The Life According to Sara Guterman and lastly Part IV The Inherited Life. A Postscript on the events on the novel completes ]

Like the Gutermans, the Deressers also came to Colombia with their dream of setting up a profitable business and starting a new life. However with the coming of World War II and the publication of the lists, which had Konrad, the family patriarchs name in it, hindered such plans. While the Gutermans represented immigrants who were able to dodge and survive the lists and the war, the Deressers represented immigrants whose lives ended tragically. Vsquez presented two ways of looking at the immigrant experience as well as the role of history in shaping their identities and the course of their lives. No matter how hard we try, he said, thats what we immigrants are, producers of warts. (Vsquez 137).The good old Konrad, now without a wife and an estranged relationship with his son slowly deteriorated from the time he had been detained in Duitama. His soft-spoken nature and failure to adjust to Colombian culture, its customs and language became his downfall. Even if the people he had business ties with knows he is no Nazi sympathizer, by simply being on the list, labels him an outsider. This not only shows the power of the list and those who inform in its creation, but also how an immigrant is treated, that he will always be a foreigner. For him his identity had been foremost shaped by his language, where he says was meant to be spoken aloudsomething that the Colombian government curtailed during the war. Konrad could also never see himself as German-Colombian the way his son did.Enrique, for the first time, found out what your dad was always knew: you are what you say, you are how you say it. For old Konrad things were exactly the opposite (Vsquez 138).As told by Sara, Enrique had always acted distant towards his father for he reminded him of a past and an identity he did not wish to ever share. In the novel, the private sphere becomes the only way for Konrad to practice and retain his identity. German is only spoken in the Deresser household, one that Enrique ran away from once his father had been detained. Enrique was raised as a hybrid of two cultures and identities, German, by his father and Colombian, by his mother and the country he grew up in. He saw the way his fathers lineage, as well as his father turn into a ghost or a reminder of a past and an identity that did not fit him. His relationship with his father further estranged his ties with his German heritage. For Enrique his identity is shaped by the people he socializes with. He saw his father as a weak-willed man however stubborn he may be in clinging on to his German roots. Estranged father and son relations in the novel does not stop there. The two Gabriel Santorosthe elder orator and the younger journalist turned historians relationship had remained distant from the beginning of the novel. Gabriel Jr. grew up under the influence of his orator and professor of a father, whose declamations on Demosthenes intimidated him. His father was a known intellectual in Bogot, who carried an appeal similar to that of Jorge Gaitn while he was a journalist trying to make something of himself.In his attempts to understand his father and his accidental death, Gabriel again asks Sara Guterman, the familys close friend. Gabriel then realizes why his father had openly criticized his work on Gutermans life, A Life in Exile and why he looks to the past with regret and disdain. The elder Santoro was an informer. During World War II, Colombia as well as other Latin American countries set up lists depicting German immigrants, who had been suspected for being Nazi sympathizers. His role as an informer strains his relationship with his friend Enrique by name-dropping good old Konrad to the Colombian government.The Summa Theologica denies that God can unmake the past, says the narrator of this story; but he also says that to modify the past, is not to modify a single fact, but to annul the consequences of the fact, that is to create two universal histories...maybe my task, in the future would be too reconstruct two histories, useslessly to confront them (Vsquez 182).The son plays chronicler of his father and Saras lives and eventually shares their perspectives towards the past and changes how he relates to his father, his own self and that particular time in Colombia. How he relates to his father is symbolic of how Colombia looks back to its history as a nation during that particular time. The younger Santoro tries to reconcile the history that has been handed down to him, one that did not include his father as an informer and traitor and the second one that does, according to Sara. To know about Colombias past is to know about his fathers. In his attempts to reconcile these histories, his fathers identity as well as his own, he makes his another book, another history where his father was able to make amends for his sin towards the Deressers and lived to tell about it. In the same way identities our influenced and shaped by an individuals own and shared history with others, Santoro finds his own. Identity-formation for the character is seen as something fluid with its ties to history pivotal and how one fashions his or her own.Her body, it seemed to me, had lived at a different rhythm: it didnt show the marks of time, the tiredness of the skin; it didnt show the tensions, the course, or the way pain marks peoples faces, scratches their eyes and forces them to wear glasses, contorts the corners of mouths and scores their necks like a plow. Or was it perhaps more precise to speak of memory: Saras body accumulated time, but had no memory (Vsquez 79).Without the father-son dramas and immigrant dilemmas is Sara Guterman, who plays a pivotal role in keeping the novel from turning into a weepie of a read and a key force in keeping the two Santoros sane. After the elder Gabriels death, Sara effortlessly takes care of his funeral arrangements and later on becomes the younger Gabriels confidante. Saras relationship with her father is not necessarily a dear one, but compared to the two father and sons fares better. Her father had raised her as an interpreter for their German and Colombian guests at the Nueva Europa and one that should contain her emotions. This restraint kept the Gutermans alive, as Jewish-German immigrants in Colombia and Saras philosophy on life.Sara kept her memory apart: in boxes and files and photographs, and in the cassettes of which I was the custodian, that seemed to absorb Saras history and at the same time withdraw it from her body (Vsquez 79).In the novel Sara served two purposes, one as witness to the injustices done on her fellow countrymen, the Deressers and two, as a key figure in helping the younger Santoro reconcile with his father. Sara remains a degree of distance towards the other characters in the novel, even towards the elder Santoro. Her being distant does not mean that she had alienated herself from the others but more of her being able to walk away from a situation if it becomes too much of a burden for her. Being Jewish and how her people had been treated by the Nazis during World War II has help shape her view of things and of life, as her father had taught her so. She remains distant towards her past and homeland but does not forget. She sees her past as something important in her upbringing and how she sees herself. From there she feels secure about herself and the life she had lived in Colombia.You wouldnt expect to make such a trip to receive bad newsMine wasnt so serious, but almost, because in my case it was as if the world from before emigration was longer trustworthy (Vsquez 185).The ability to interpret symbols has gone for me, and God does with that. Its as if it were extinguished. One gets tired of looking behind things. Maybe for you young people its hard to understand, but thats what God is for old people: a fellow weve been playing hide-and-seek with for too long. Youll have to decide if you want to leave all this nonsense in the book (Vsquez 187).Theres an instance in the novel where many years after the war, along with her father visits Emmerich, Germany, their hometown. Of the years she spent away from the country, instead of being taken over by longing, again she feels distant in the same way she was now on her belief in God. Two influences in shaping ones identity are ones homeland and religion, as a part of cultural history. For Sara however, her notion of identity is not anymore shaped by ones physical attachment to the homeland and its customs. Her stay in Colombia did not make her less of a German or more of a Colombian either. For Sara and her father, it was important to think about but it should not hinder them from living their lives. As Santoros book A Life in Exile points out, Sara and the Gutermans lives made it possible to look at a nations history or histories without too much emotional baggage and as a key factor in shaping ones identity.Friedman in Nazis and Good Neighbors shows how Germans in Latin America were also discriminated for being Nazis. Inadequate information or background on those who had been included in the list can be likened to that of the Issei in America. By virtue of their race they have been identified as Nazi sympathizers. The Colombian governments reliance on informers also showed how they lacked the necessary means for identifying these sympathizers from those, like the Gutermans and the Deressers who had simply come to Colombia to escape persecution from their fellow countrymen and start a new life away from the troubles of Europe. While it can be argued that Konrad, during a family dinner held with Herr Bethke, a self-confessed Nazi expressed his agreement towards how Germans, through tempering their language had been oppressed by the indifferent Colombian government and some of its people, he did not necessarily side with Bethke. He takes no sides, one that angers his son Enrique, whose Colombian heritage has been ridiculed by Bethke. Key historical moments in Vsquezs The Informers shape the identities of the novels characters along with their relationships with one another. Like Sara, history can be a pivotal part of ones life, however traumatic ones past is or may be. Ones history and the history of Colombia and the Second World War serves as lesson often forgotten by people of a younger generation. Both known and unknown histories are lessons that more often than not help shape our way of seeing ourselves in relation to others, our country and the future.

Works Cited

Friedman, M. P. (2003). Seeking Nazis Among Good Neighbors: The United States Campaign Against Germans of Latin America in World War II. Cambridge: Cambridge University.Hall, S. (n.d.). Cultural Identity and Diaspora. (J. Pines, Ed.) Framework(36), 222-237.Stets, J. E., & Burke, P. J. (2000). Identity Theory and Social Identity Theory. Social Psychology Quarterly, pp. 224-237.Vasquez, J. G. (2008). The Informers. (A. McLean, Trans.) New York: Riverhead.