Breaking the silence, dismantling taboos: Latino novels on AIDS

As AIDS has ravaged the world in the last two decades, literature has played an important role in giving testimony of the epidemic. According to different communities and particular experiences, AIDS literature can offer ways of coping and surviving. In the last few years the U.S. Latino/a population has been highly affected by AIDS. The first genres to register AIDS were poetry and theatre. In this essay I examine how AIDS is represented in the first four Latino novels to deal with the subject matter: Ana Castillo's So Far from God, Daniel Torres's Morirás si da una primavera, Elías Miguel Muñoz's The Greatest Performance, and Jaime Manrique's latin Moon in Manhattan. My critical reading centers on how AIDS constitutes a new articulation of identity, particularly gay and ethnic identity. Most importantly, I propose that these novels contribute to dismantling homophobia and compulsory heterosexuality, deconstructing sexual and cultural taboos, and breaking the silence on AIDS/SIDA.