Catalina

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of self-harm.

Catalina is a novel about the power of storytelling and controlling one’s own narrative. Stories construct reality and shape identities, so whoever tells our collective and individual stories has immense power. Catalina argues that marginalized people are often denied the chance to self-narrate both their personal stories and collective histories, resulting in a loss of agency and a crisis of identity. However, this can be reversed by reclaiming one’s own story.

As a young undocumented woman, Catalina Ituralde has spent much of her life at the mercy of others. She was shuttled between her parents, her aunt and uncle, and her grandparents, and now her fate rests in the hands of politicians debating immigration reform. She also has little to no firsthand experience with her own history and ancestry. Apart from a few early memories, all her knowledge of Ecuador and Latin America comes from her grandfather or her Harvard professors and classmates. Nevertheless, Catalina tends toward “self-protagonism” and wants to become a writer to retell her story on her own terms. She sees literature as a “beautiful” alternative to the “sad” “real world” (8), capable of reshaping reality into something more attractive.

Storytelling is also a form of permanence; due to the instability she has experienced, Catalina is attracted to this opportunity to preserve herself and her loved ones. When her grandfather is facing deportation, for example, she wishes that she “could transfigure [his] stories into literature” so that “they could no longer be disappeared” (162). This concept of storytelling as permanence also comes into play through the question of who controls the story of Latin America more broadly. Much of the novel focuses on the khipu, an Incan recording device made from string. Over generations of colonization, most khipus have been lost or destroyed, along with the knowledge necessary for reading the remaining specimens, representing a near complete loss of collective indigenous history, memory, and, therefore, identity. The khipus that do exist are mostly studied by white anthropologists and kept in museums far away from the Andes and out of the control of those to whom their history pertains. In other words, Catalina’s loss of control over her personal narrative is generations deep.

Throughout the novel, Catalina fights against others’ perceptions and expectations of her. She doesn’t want to come out publicly as undocumented because she worries that becoming a “poster girl” will make her immigration status the only thing people see about her and will undermine her attempt to be a “serious and important capital-A artist” (65). When her grandfather faces deportation, she reaches out to film director Byron Wheeler for help, and these fears are realized. Byron immediately takes control of Catalina’s story, ignoring her desire to center the film project on her grandfather and insisting that focusing on Catalina as an undocumented Harvard student is their “best angle.” While filming, Catalina’s loss of agency manifests physically in an inability to speak or move her body.

At the end of the novel, Catalina reclaims both her personal and ancestral stories. Before he “self-deports,” Francisco steals a khipu from Harvard’s end-of-year exhibition and gives it to Catalina, symbolically returning the generations of lost knowledge and history to its rightful owner. She also terminates her project with Byron, thereby retaking ownership of her personal story. “The worst [has] happened” (191); Catalina’s family has been broken up, and she has been ejected into the world as an undocumented adult, but reclaiming her agency gives her a sense of peace and a belief that she can make her life into something, despite all the obstacles.