Healing Specters and Borderlands Trauma in Ire’ne Lara Silva’s flesh to bone

Abstract:This essay analyzes spectral presences in two stories published in Ire’ne Lara Silva’s short story collection, flesh to bone (2013). Spectrality theory holds that specters can represent unresolved trauma by keeping present events that have been erased, forgotten, or suppressed from official memory and/or discourse. Aligning with this claim, specters in the selected stories, “duérmete” and “la huesera, or, flesh to bone,” haunt in memory of acts of violence against women. Both stories recognize their characters’ trauma with spectral presences that draw upon the legend of a healer called La Huesera, a woman of folklore from the US/Mexico borderlands. In “duérmete,” ghosts haunt an individual who suffered domestic abuse, rape, and the consequential loss of her unborn child. Elements of the legendary huesera appear in the story to help the victim reconcile with her past. Lara Silva’s story “la huesera, or, flesh to bone” reinscribes La Huesera, creating a new version of the legend in which the spectral healer brings peace to hundreds of women murdered in the femicide occurring in the El Paso/Ciudad Juárez border region. With the study of these two texts, this essay asserts the spectral role in the representation and healing of individual and collective trauma.