"Las palabras silenciosas": imagen artística de una historia de infamia

Abstract

This essay explores some of the angles of the ancient and complex relationship between History and Literature, with special attention on the episode of persecution and harassment of the Chinese community in Mexico, particularly in the northern region. Some of the texts that have been concerned with telling these events are reviewed, despite the willingness to keep them hidden and silenced; this examination is intended to explain the historical substrate that beats in Inés Arredondo's short-story "The Silent Words", the subject of analysis of the article. I use the notions of metaphor and ambiguity to try to explain how literary creation proceeds with the materials provided by history and how it builds an artistic image and a sense of recreated facts, always in adjoining and dialogue with the procedures of historiographical discipline.