SOURCE: "The Text as Tortured/Torture in the Text: Claribel Alegría's Luisa in Realityland," in Chasqui—Revista de literatura latinoamericana, Vol. XXI, No. 2, November, 1992, pp. 20-6.

In the following excerpt, Saltz maintains that Luisa in Realityland qualifies as a "poststructural text," connects it to the tradition of insurgent political literature in Latin America, and explores poetic aspects of the work.

Salvadoran writer Claribel Alegría's Luisa in Realityland is a tortured text. It aptly illustrates Angel Rama's observation that while a critical panorama of European literatures evokes a well ordered and cultivated garden, that of Latin American literature calls to mind a confusing jungle in which roads are tortuously carved or often actually incised. Published in 1987, Luisa in Realityland presents a problematic which treats that confusion and disjuncture in a passionately critical view of the totalitarian repression and violence in El Salvador, its link to Latin American...