Unica Oconitrillo

The Costa Rican writer Fernando Contreras Castro's first novel, Unica mirando al mar (1994), deals with the supposedly "subculture" of the buzos, those individuals who live by scavenging (buceando) Río Azul, the major garbage dump of the city of San José, Costa Rica. The residents of Río Azul satisfy their basic needs with what they find on the dump. In addition to food, clothing, and shelter, the buzos encounter human warmth, solidarity, and love amidst the waste.

The title character, Unica Oconitrillo, is, for Contreras Castro, the archetypical Latin American woman--strong and willing to struggle relentlessly in order to survive. Her role, and by extension that of working-class Latin American women everywhere, is to preserve the elemental unit of society, the family. In the novel, Unica finds a child, El Bacán, abandoned on the dump. She "recycles" the child, raising him as her own. She also retrieves a husband, Momboñombo Moñagallo, from the landfill and recycles him as well.

Indeed, in the initial phases of the novel, Unica is a prime mover in the effort to maintain "traditional" human and family values in the midst of the ultimate consumer wasteland, Río Azul. Though she has neither electricity nor television, Unica goes so far as to adorn her hovel with that ultimate icon of the church of the media, a useless television antenna. Following Unica's lead, the buzos faithfully reproduce the models elaborated by the media. Contreras Castro argues, however, that this is because they have no alternatives. They are passive receptors of a social text constructed by a faceless class of professional technocrats. There is no "outside," no empty page on which to write their own social text. Even their own bodies are already written by the toxic messages (a modern version of Kafka's harrow) which continuously bombard them at Río Azul. Within consumer culture, by definition, no alternative culture can exist. "Everything" is commodified.

When El Bacán dies Moñagallo and Unica suddenly realize that their received values are a myth or fábula. They leave Río Azul to journey to a small town on the coast, Puntarenas. There they discover that nothing has changed, that they are still "inside" the discourse represented by Río Azul. They cannot escape Río Azul either figuratively (they are still trapped within the disposable society) or literally (toxins from Río Azul have contaminated the aquifer at Puntarenas). There is no "outside," no clean sheet on which to write a new fábula or new values. At the end of the novel Unica tosses the petals of a red rose, one by one, onto the sea at Puntarenas. The rose, the one thing of beauty in the novel, disappears without a trace into the immensity of the sea, symbolizing the manner in which their modest hope for a new beginning is swallowed effortlessly by the omnipresent sea of consumer production that surrounds them.

Unica represents the long-struggling Latin American woman, and at the same time points out the futility of her struggle. Try as she might, she can neither preserve traditional values nor create new ones. In this sense Unica is a tragic figure, one doomed to eternally roll the stone of family values up the hill of consumer society, only to see it ceaselessly roll back down on her, no matter how great her efforts to the contrary. Whether one considers her actions heroic or foolish, she is, at least in the eyes of Contreras Castro, a doomed figure in the present Latin American cultural reality.

Bibliography

Contreras, Fernando. Unica mirando al mar.Costa Rica: Ediciones Farben, 1994.

Hernández, Edin. "Unica: La forteleza de la desesperación." Signos: Semanario cultural 36 (1994): 1-2.

Hoeg, Jerry. "The Discourse of Science in Fernando Contreras Castro's Unica mirando al mar." Revista de Estudios Canadienses 20.3 (1996): 491-504.

Villalobos, M.L. Carlos. "Unica mirando al mar de Fernando Contreras." Tertulia: Taller de literatura de San Ramón, Costa Rica 2.3 (1994): 15-16.

Jerrold Hoeg
Penn State University