The Latinx/Indigenous community’s experiences and stories in Kali Fajardo-Anstine’s short story collection Sabrina & Corina are often told through silence, of what is left unsaid. In “Ghost Sickness,” Ana’s mom reminds her that memory “doesn’t have to be story-memory […] It can be a picture, a feeling” (202). This story draws out intergenerational trauma by letting us enter the experiences of two generations struggling to take ownership and define the community’s historical memory. The older generation carry an incredible burden of pain and disappointment, of the racism the community has experienced including environmental degradation, the missing and murdered women, and the effects of colonization on the family structure. The younger generation slowly learns to understand what is left unsaid in their community as they learn to read the silences.     

Dr. Dora Ramírez is a Professor of Ethnic Studies and the Director of the Anti-Racism Collective at Boise State University in the Department of Sociology. She holds a doctorate in English, with a focus on Ethnic Literature, from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Her research focuses on ideas of nation-building while examining the internalization of socio-political global effects and the influence of colonization among Latinx and Indigenous populations in the United States and the U.S./Mexico border. Her work appears in various journals and she is the author of Medical Fragmentation: Literary Modernism, Scientific Discourse, and the Mexican, Indigenous Body, 1870-1940s which analyzes the medical industry’s colonial influences on indigenous peoples at the turn of the 19th century. She is currently working on a book titled, Victim: Another Meaning, which analyzes the rhetorical uses of the concept “victim” and seeks to disentangle the varied definitions from the reality of what it means to be a victim in a polarized and racialized society in contemporary United State culture.

This event is part of the 2023 Winter Read of Sabrina & Corina. Read more about the Winter Read here.

The program will be livestreamed and available to watch later. Click here to watch online.