Ethical Memory and Re-Presenting History Across Empire: The Korean War in Rolando Hinojosa's Klail City Death Trip

This article examines how the representation of the Korean War in Rolando Hinojosa’s Klail City Death Trip series (KCDTS) critiques official histories of U.S. empire through an engagement with ethical memory. KCDTS is a multi-volume, multi-genre work that consists of eleven to fifteen texts1; these texts function both as independent, individual entities and as serial installments of one continuous novel-inprogress with overlapping characters, storylines, and settings. The Klail City referred to in the title of the series is a fictitious small rural town in the Lower Rio Grande Valley region of Texas on the U.S.-Mexico border. The series depicts the lives of Texas Mexican Americans in the Valley from as early as 1749,2 in a city controlled by the white Klail-BlanchardCooke family, who have controlled the county politically and economically since the turn of the century. Rafe Buenrostro, the main protagonist of the series, fights as a U.S. soldier in the Korean War and a trilogy of books—Korean Love Songs (1978), Rites and Witnesses (1982), and The Useless Servants (1993)—depicts his war experience. Up until the last decade, scholars who had analyzed Hinojosa’s KCDTS tended to cover the Korean War installments briefly or skip them altogether. The only major earlier study concerning the significance of the Korean War in Hinojosa’s fiction was Ramón Saldívar’s essay “Rolando Hinojosa’s Korean Love Songs and the Klail City Death Trip: A Border Ballad and Its Heroes” in his brilliant 1990 book Chicano Narrative: The Dialectics of Difference. In it he argues that the mid-century Mexican American protagonist of Korean Love Songs is the analogue of the early20th-century border ballad, concerned still with border conflict and social justice struggles while also reflecting vast historical and geopolitical