Night becomes "Latina": Mariana Romo-Carmona′s Living at Night and the tactics of abjection

This essay examines the tactical implications of the subaltern discourse of night in U.S.-based Chilean writer Mariana Romo-Carmona′s 1997 novel Living at Night about a working class Puerto Rican lesbian woman employed on the nightshift in an institution for mentally disabled women. The essay argues that in the novel nighttime is made to perform the cultural work of redefining diasporas and borders, exilic memory, sexual, ethnic, and racial identities, and social positioning in terms of power or agency, deterritorializing these variables from co n v e ntional or dominant values. Specifically, this deep-structure redefinition is accomplished by co n fronting culturally induced shame, fear, and repudiation and deliberate ly embracing the abjection inherent in transculturation or in the contaminating ( not-me ) contact zone between identities and cultures that trangresses their limits.