The Burden of the Past: Globalized Crime, Trauma, and Patriarchal Violence in Horacio Castellanos Moya’s Moronga (2018)

This article examines how trauma, crime, violence, and masculinity are connected in the novel Moronga (2018) by Honduran–Salvadoran author Horacio Castellanos Moya. The novel highlights the ways in which, thirty years after the signing of the Peace Accords, war trauma continues to oppress survivors of the civil war and determine their daily lives, beyond temporal and geographical borders. The novel points out how the transition into the neoliberal economy has transnationalized all aspects of the Salvadoran economy, including that of organized crime, which has undergone globalization, as have trauma and Salvadoran communities. Through the novel’s depiction of violence and crime, the author suggests that only those who perpetuate patriarchal violence in postwar diasporic communities will thrive, whereas those who aspire to carry out memory labor and peacefully heal the emotional wounds of the past will be defeated by the perverse logic of the system.