Cultural Alienation and Colonial Desire in "Alienacion" by Julio Ramon Ribeyro (Critical Essay)

DESPITE its political independence that dates back to the early 19th century, Latin America has been the subject in one way or another of overt or inconspicuous forms of neo-colonial domination exercised by the United States. The US's imperialist discourse--now disseminated with even greater efficiency under the guise of neo-liberalism and globalization--reproduces itself in different sites of the colonized, becoming visible in such aspects as race, ethnicity, difference, representation, migration, and imperial suppression. This essay proposes a postcolonial reading of the short story "Alienacion" by the Peruvian author Julio Ramon Ribeyro, in order to shed light on how the metropolitan modes of representation are received and appropriated by the periphery, as the story's protagonist plays out the politics of the imperial, meaning North American, paradigm. (1) I will also argue that the text dismantles colonial discourse by highlighting its unsuitability within Peruvian/Latin American context and by exposing the false promise of the metropolitan project. Ribeyro, the recipient of the highly regarded 1994 Premio de Literatura Juan Rulfo, echoes the Mexican literary icon in his exquisitely concise prose, which relies on a strong emotional charge that transpires through his realistic texts, and in his concern for the lives of the wretched. In the same vein, Ribeyro exhibits a strong interest in every aspect of the experience of marginalization, be it spatial (as in living on the border, or markedly outside the metropolis), physical (concerning one's appearance, which inevitably encompasses social and cultural limitations as well), and finally existential, oftentimes being the result of one's inability (contested or not) to interiorize predominant cultural norms. This disorienting paradox of 'otherness,' of feeling foreign within the realm of the familiar, while at the same time sensing sameness in a territory of difference, shows in the story "Alienacion" the effects of what Roberto Fernandez Retamar terms the infection with the ideology of the enemy, where the Latin American subject is "but a distorted echo of what occurs elsewhere" (3). The story offers an ironic and ultimately tragic insight into the life of Roberto, a mixed-race limeno, whose dream is to become a white American from the United States. As part of this frustrated project of assimilation, he strives to transform himself physically, dresses like a US tourist, and seeks to learn English. He eventually relocates to New York, where after months of poverty he enlists in the US Army, where things end tragically.