Arquitectura del vaivén: Diasporic Building(s) in Central America’s Northern Triangle and Anthropophagic Subjectivity

• In Event: Performing insurrections. Four cuir anthropophagic perspectives

Abstract

Through a close reading of Walterio Iraheta’s (El Salvador) photographic archive that documents remittance architecture in the Northern Triangle of Central America, my paper argues for the centrality of the Central American migrant as an “anthropophagic subjectivity” (Rolnik) that challenges the status quo in order to contest injustice and inequality and potentialize transformation. The distinct houses built in Central America by its diaspora become sites of dialogue, revealing previously unknown narratives, discourses and dictions that emerge from the porous cycles of vaivén that enable their construction. These sites further re-colonize architecture in praxis and elucidate on the salient issues prevalent in the region’s contemporary social reality. Remittance architecture (hybrid, fluid), therefore, becomes a collective expression of the complexities inherent in the experience of migration while dismantling the metaphor of the house that would otherwise render movement static. Underscoring the materiality of “the hope of return” to the home country from the host country, these structures embody the effects of violence and its derivatives, including longing as a condition that perpetuates an imaginary of connection and reunification for fragmented identities and give voice to a newfound relationship with the country and people left behind. My aim is to highlight the transnational desires of Central American migrants made visible through efforts to construct analogies of a dream that has become doubly deferred but not impeded-- the concrete manifestation of a re-signified presence in absence continually remitting.

Author

• Gabriela Poma, Harvard University