39 pages • 1 hour read
Héctor TobarThe Tattooed Soldier
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1998A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Identity: Marking or Being Marked
As the title indicates, the idea of marking or being marked is important in this novel. This is first demonstrated in the title, The Tattooed Soldier, which refers to Longoria and the jaguar tattoo on his arm. For Longoria, marking himself means empowerment: He was kidnapped and forced to be a soldier, and was eventually assigned to the Jaguar Battalion. He gets the battalion’s namesake tattooed onto his body, as he feels it represents him and it makes him feel safe. By getting the tattoo, Longoria is attempting to take control of his life story and embrace his role as a soldier. The tattoo also separates him from other Guatemalans, the people he is ordered to target, because tattoos are not very common in Guatemala. The fact that the tattoo is American creates further separation, since local tattoos tend to be crude.
In Guatemala, Elena and Antonio are marked simply by being students. Given the political context in Guatemala, students are viewed as potential enemies of the government, partly because liberal and reformist ideas tend to proliferate on college campuses. The fact that Elena pursues her investigation about sanitation in the slum marks them as such enemies, which leads the government to decide to eliminate them. Throughout their lives, the Guatemalan people are marked by their party affiliation; by their family background; by their education; by their status as peasants, soldiers, inhabitants of the capital, etc.
In Los Angeles people are marked as homeless, black, white, or Latino. Antonio notes that the encampment is one place where such markings do not hold weight. This is also the case at the chess tables where Longoria plays. Of course, as Longoria’s fate shows, immigrants can be marked out as having committed evil deeds in their country of origin, and they may face justice despite having fled.
The Experience of Latino Immigrants
One thing demonstrated by the novel is the diversity of Latin American immigrant experiences in the United States. Some immigrants are homeless, while others (such as Duarte) own businesses and homes. Some are college-educated and intellectual, like Antonio, while others are less intelligent but still dedicated and hardworking, like José Juan.
On the other hand, there is a collective plight: José Juan, Longoria, and Antonio are all forced to the bottom of society despite their varying skills and education. Immigrating to America does not guarantee a completely new life full of opportunity and financial security. This is seen in Chapter 1, when Antonio, newly homeless, observes his new surroundings and sees parallels to San Cristóbal, the “horrible” village with its deplorable slum. This idea of immigrants traveling to a new country to escape their past only to wind up confronting it anew is also exemplified in other ways, such as when José Juan pretends to have a job and own a Chevy despite being homeless and penniless, and when Antonio encounters Longoria in the park, which brings all the trauma he endured in Guatemala back to the forefront of his mind. Despite the animosity between Antonio and Longoria, their shared experience of the adversity that faces immigrants evokes a flash of pity for Longoria within Antonio.
Finally, Tobar uses these immigrant characters to compare the United States and Latin America. In this novel he is less interested in the US’ role in Guatemala, for example, than he is in parallels between both countries. The depictions of slums and homelessness in San Cristóbal and Los Angeles are a clear example of this. By setting the book’s climax during the LA riots, Tobar also draws a parallel between the Guatemalan Army and the LA police, two government-backed forces that attempt to eradicate the poor or other unseemly citizens, and which treat those citizens with unwarranted cruelty and violence rather than addressing the underlying issues to enact true change. Such comparisons further emphasize that immigrating from one country does not guarantee better circumstances or opportunity in another.
Violence in Guatemala and El Salvador
The novel focuses on these two nations as countries experiencing oppressive regimes in the 1980s. One of the earliest events in the novel’s chronology is Longoria’s abduction while watching a movie. The date of this event is roughly 1982, around the time that General Efraín Ríos Montt overthrew the government. Montt did not last long and was eventually ousted by one of his own ministers. This period is an interesting choice of setting because it demonstrates extreme turmoil in a country where there was very little stability even within the ruling party. The result is a deterioration of morals and justice from top to bottom, and this is the atmosphere in which the soldiers kidnap Longoria with impunity, taking him with force and then training him to use force on his fellow citizens. This chaos in some way mirrors that of the Rodney King riots 10 years later in Los Angeles, which forms the setting of the novel’s climate, but Tobar does not make a definitive statement about the meaning of that mirroring.
Americans readers are likely not aware of the violence that plagued El Salvador and Guatemala in the late 20th century. Part of the book’s purpose is to first make readers aware of this violence, and then to help them understand it and thereby understand the experience of the many Guatemalan and Salvadoran immigrants now living in the United States. Tobar focuses on Antonio and Longoria (and even Elena) to show two experiences of this violence, from the perspective of a victim and the perspective of a cog in the machine.
The novel also addresses the enduring impact of this oppression. That Antonio is confronted with his tragic past in a park in LA, thousands of miles from Guatemala, demonstrates that simply escaping the environment is not enough, as it still leaves wounds. This is true even for Longoria, since it could be argued that his support of the Guatemalan government was a coping mechanism developed to ensure his survival, which further emphasizes both the complexity and the barbarity of oppressive regimes.
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