Violence and motherhood in a postwar context. Reflections from the novel Roza tumba quema by Claudia Hernández

Abstract

El Salvador’s civil war, which pitted the armed forces against the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front fought for more than ten years (1979-1992), left the country devastated and further immersed in poverty, with 75,000 people dead and missing, thousands of women victims of sexual violence and an uncertain number of children whose whereabouts are unknown. The subject of Salvadoran combatant mothers has been little studied, as has the war and its impact on the literature. This paper will focus on the analysis of a novel about the armed conflict in which violence against women, as well as motherhood, play a central role. It is Roza tumba quema by Claudia Hernández González (San Salvador, 1975) published in 2017. This article will analyze the novel from a gender perspective and will rely on the ideas of Rita Segato to account for the way in which violence against women, and their bodies, has been fictionalized in the context of the Central American civil war. This work aims to be a contribution to the study of Salvadoran literature and motherhood in contemporary Latin American literature.