Abstract

In “Remaking Human Being,” the author enumerates the decolonial elements of Helena María Viramontes’s novel Their Dogs Come with Them to illustrate the importance of literature and literary criticism for a decolonial project. After defining decoloniality, the essay shows that Viramontes structures her narrative and personifies her characters to reveal the socioeconomic and ideological forces that keep Latinx and other people of color in conditions of subordination. Moreover, Viramontes’s pluralized and digressive narrative structure, together with a faithful witnessing of her characters’ daily actions and embodied subjectivities, demonstrates the importance for social justice projects of cultivating multiple and diverse perspectives on any given event. By enabling her characters—and her readers—to develop a kaleidoscopic consciousness, Viramontes effectively provides the imaginative resources to facilitate our ability to remake ourselves and their world(s) we share.