Love, Confinement, and Structural Violence: An Intersectional and Decolonial Reading of Guillermo Arriaga’s Salvar el fuego
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.18533/xjkx3q90Abstract
This article offers an intersectional and decolonial analysis of Guillermo Arriaga’s Salvar el fuego (2020), positioning the novel as a critique of structural and necropolitical power in contemporary Mexico. Drawing on Kimberlé Crenshaw, Rita Segato, Gloria Anzaldúa, and Achille Mbembe, it argues that the text exposes how coloniality organizes race, gender, and class into differential regimes of vulnerability and criminalization. The novel interrogates mestizaje as a national myth that conceals pigmentocratic hierarchies and racialized carceral governance. Through its portrayal of intimate attachment within carceral space, Salvar el fuego renders love legible as a site where structural violence becomes affectively embodied. Its polyphonic form further destabilizes dominant epistemologies by redistributing narrative authority to marginalized subjects. Ultimately, the article contends that Arriaga’s novel reconfigures romance and confinement as analytic lenses through which the enduring logics of colonial power and state abandonment are made visible.
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