Ghosts in the Machine: Valeria Luiselli’s Los ingravidos and the Return of the Repressed in New York City

• In Event: Fantasmas (inter)nationales: Spectral Mexicanness in Mexico and Beyond

Abstract

Mexican writer Valeria Luiselli’s acclaimed first novel Los ingravidos (translated in 2014 as Faces in the Crowd) reads as a sublimely contemporary ghost story that reaches back to early twentieth century New York City to conjure the spectral presence of Mexican poet Gilberto Owen. Owen’s poetry speaks to the dispossessed transnational experience of the traveler who attempts to settle in a place, and fails. Likewise, Luiselli’s text, porous and ethereal in form and achingly alienated from the city it traces, uses the specter of Owen to gesture toward an existence that was always marginal, and is now erased to the point of invisibility in the concrete geography of place. As the novel progresses, Owen appears to narrate his own story, as imagined by the narrator/writer, and the stories begin to intertwine. Both the narrator and Owen fail to integrate into the narrative of the American Dream, in which the model immigrant serves to reify and solidify the hegemonic discourse of the great melting pot. They fail because they feel themselves insubstantial, not seen, not understood by the society that surrounds them. There is paradoxical demand for authenticity—Represent your people! Translate your art and language into ours!—and a rejection of the actual identity of the individual beyond the stereotype. Because there is no place for these identities in the realm of real, they surface as ghostly presences, falsifications and phantom places. In this way, the novel serves as homage to Owen, and a retaking of possibilities and territories lost.

Author

• Cheyla R Samuelson, San José State University