Imagine you're a kid, doing the usual kid things.

Building forts, making mud pies, drawing... this... for some reason.

But even in the bubble of childhood, you feel it-the secrets, the silence, the fear.

There's a dark shadow around you.

You can't see its whole shape or tell what's casting it.

It's only later that you understand: While you were learning your ABCs, your country was falling apart.

That's the experience for kids growing up during a war or a dictatorship.

Now flash-forward a few decades, and those children have grown up and are carrying around an adult's understanding of what happened-with a kid's memory of it.

How do they make sense of the two?

How do they honor the memory of terrible events... that they don't fully remember?

Hi!

I'm Curly Velasquez and this is Crash Course Latin American Literature.

[THEME MUSIC] The 1970s and '80s were turbulent times in Latin America.

And I don't just mean the fashion - I mean politically.

Governments and rebel groups played tug-of-war for power, often funded in part by international parties with their own interests.

And these shakeups came with brutal violence and human rights abuses from all sides.

By 1977, only a handful of nations in Latin America hadn't gotten the dictator makeover.

Which is hideous, by the way.

Never in style.

This means that a whole generation of kids grew up in the shadow of dictators.

And some of those kids went on to be writers, producing a wave of what's called postmemorial literature - texts that reflect on the memory of collective trauma.

In Latin America, this genre has come to be known as literatura de los hijos - "literature of the children."

And often, it blurs the lines between fact and fiction.

Take Alejandro Zambra.

He wasn't even born yet when his home country of Chile fell to a military coup led by Augusto Pinochet in 1973.

By the time Zambra was a year old, the regime had arrested and tortured around 130,000 people.

Early on, the government detained and murdered Pinochet's political opponents in the national soccer stadium.

Within a few years, kids were eating ice cream cones in that same stadium.

So in a way, state violence was all Zambra knew growing up, but he didn't really know it.

Not with all the silence and fear surrounding it.

Zambra's 2011 novel "Formas de volver a casa," "Ways of Going Home," deals with this struggle of knowing and not knowing.

Half of it's told from the perspective of a nameless nine-year-old in 1985, at the height of Pinochet's power.

The other half?

From the perspective of a nameless novelist in 2010 who's writing the story of that nine-year-old.

Like Zambra, the novelist grew up under Pinochet's regime and has burning questions from his past.

His search is haunted not just by what he doesn't know, but by what's been disappeared from collective memory.

It's not a stretch to say that the novelist character is a stand-in for Zambra.

A novel about a novelist who represents the real novelist.

Kinda trippy, right?

This framing makes "Ways of Going Home" an example of metafiction, a self-aware literary style that emphasizes its own creation.

And by using this style, Zambra shows us that writing fiction is a way of reconstructing the past.

But there's a catch.

While the boy in the story eventually learns some big, important truths, the novelist never gets answers.

And that uncertainty is kinda the point.

Zambra's English translator Megan McDowell observes that Zambra has a bone to pick with the traditional novel and what she calls its "sure, declarative voice."

"That novel belongs to our parents," the novelist character says.

As for his generation, experimental work that exposes its own fictionality... ironically feels more truthful.

Which makes sense, right?

When a false version of "the truth" has been imposed on you, you might find black-and-white certainty to be less honest than the messiness of not knowing.

Not knowing if you can trust your own memories.

Not knowing if you can trust the official record.

And not knowing what really happened to people you knew.

And when something like this has happened to you, can you write about anything else?

Let's get the Curly Notes on an author who asks that very question.

Three months before Félix Bruzzone was born in 1976, Argentina's military police detained his dad.

Not long after, they took his mom, too.

His parents were among tens of thousands of people who were kidnapped and disappeared by the military dictatorship of Jorge Videla, who's been nicknamed the "Hitler of the Pampas."

All told, Videla's regime murdered or disappeared tens of thousands of Argentinians, in an attempt to crush opposition and spread terror.

Not only that, but many of the regime's victims included pregnant women who were forced to give birth in secret detention centers, their babies taken away and illegally adopted, sometimes by the same people who had detained or killed their parents.

In his fiction, Bruzzone creates characters who are the "children of the disappeared."

Like, in the short story "Otras Fotos de Mamá," "Other Photos of Mom," the protagonist is trying to understand his dead mother by talking to her ex-boyfriend.

And in his novel "Los topos," "The Moles," the narrator is the son of disappeared parents.

But in this story, he doesn't take the typical journey to uncover the past.

Instead, he goes on a surreal quest that has actually nothing - or everything?

- to do with his parents.

As the scholar Jordana Blejmar puts it, Bruzzone "challenges the idea [...] that all children of disappeared parents are destined to go to the same places and ask the same questions."

Even when a terrible thing has happened to lots of people, the way it's remembered and experienced is still individual to each person.

And literature can give us a way of understanding that- by feeling what it's like to live a life that isn't ours.

That's especially important for elevating women's perspectives, whose stories tend to be undertold in narratives of war.

Let's take a look at Claudia Hernández's 2017 novel "Roza, tumba, quema," translated as "Slash and Burn."

It was inspired by the Salvadoran Civil War, something that personally affected Hernández - and my family, too.

It was a twelve-year conflict between El Salvador's authoritarian government and rebel groups that banded together in resistance.

They called themselves El Frente Farabundo Martí para la Liberación Nacional, the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front.

And within the movement, women took on roles as both organizers and fighters.

Meanwhile, international powers treated the whole thing like a game of 3-D chess.

Cuba and the Soviet Union bankrolled the FMLN, while the U.S.

sent billions of dollars to government militias.

By the time a peace deal was reached in 1992, tens of thousands of Salvadorans had been killed, and hundreds of thousands had fled the country, including my own family.

Now, in "Slash and burn" El Salvador isn't actually named.

In fact, no one is.

There's a very hush-hush vibe surrounding everyone's identity.

But the novel focuses on an unnamed heroine who's going through it.

First, she's a young girl dodging the rebels, then she's pregnant and fighting alongside them, then her baby is sold to fund the rebellion.

Disappearance here becomes intimate - even the bond between mother and child isn't safe.

And the threat of sexual violence follows the woman throughout her life.

Not just her, but everyone named "sister," "daughter," or "mother."

We're left with the sense that all women live with this threat.

The novel continues into the war's aftermath, where our narrator is the mother of four daughters.

Her memories overlap with their childhoods in unexpected moments - like when she realizes her daughter's bright-pink backpack would've made her an easy target as a rebel.

These echoes show us that, in some ways, the past lives on in the present.

Another novel that unpacks women's experiences of war is "La sangre de la aurora," "Blood of the Dawn," by Peruvian author Claudia Salazar Jiménez.

This one shares the perspectives of three very different female characters: a photojournalist named Melanie, an Indigenous farmer named Modesta, and a social worker named Marcela.

The novel is set at the height of "el tiempo del miedo," "the time of fear," in 1980s Peru.

On one side of the conflict, there was the Peruvian military, known for torturing and killing their own citizens.

On the other, there was Sendero Luminoso, Shining Path - a militant group hellbent on revolution, and willing to murder civilians to get there.

Caught between the two were everyday people, just trying to survive.

The novel's composed in fragments that weave through the three women's lives.

Modesta's story is written in the second person, inviting us to identify with her as her village is terrorized by the Shining Path.

Meanwhile, we watch as Marcela is swayed to the Path's cause, renaming herself "Comrade Marta."

And then there's Melanie, who's trying to shake her government escort and document the truth of what's happening.

Since she's the one carrying the camera, we might take her to be the witness and memory-keeper.

But she reminds us that she represents just one lens, and it has limits: "These are photos that push you to look outside the frame, that gesture at all that hasn't been captured... How much is outside the frame?

What stories will get away?"

And that's the struggle of memory, right?

You can't hang on to everything.

And you can't always see the full picture.

Everything outside of the frame is what's been disappeared- by censorship, by fear, and by time.

And the camera, like the novel, becomes a way to point at what's gone.

Ultimately, the three women's paths meet in the mountains.

But they also meet in violence.

Even though they have different levels of involvement in the conflict, they all suffer the same brutal fate.

In an interview, Salazar Jiménez said that though "Writing about violence is not an easy process to endure, [...] it has to be done.

We cannot relegate these stories to silence."

And that means a lot to me as a reader and as a Latin American.

It's heavy to revisit these histories, but it also feels important - because it's a part of me.

In the shadow of dictatorships, conflict, and war, many Latin American authors wrestle not just with the memory of trauma, but with the challenge of memory itself.

How do you remember when the truth is obscured by fear, or silence, or lies?

When some questions don't have answers?

And how do you put those memories into words?

Writing, and reading, can be healing - a way of reconstructing history, naming what's been disappeared, and finding answers for how to live here now.

Next time, we'll keep addressing ghosts of the past by talking about horror in Latin American Literature.

Go hug the people you love, live your best life, and I'll see you next time.