If the democratic ideal embraces "giving voice," the institution of domestic service—in these films—renders that ideal unstable. Thus, to "give voice" in representation would be to falsify the nature of the institution of domestic service. So, far from being a symptom of Cuarón's blind spot, Cleo's inscrutability, her silence, might be read as a calculated choice in the service of a different kind of intervention in politically fought terrain.

During the 40 years since these texts were published, literary critics, theorists, and historians have spoken of these artistic strategies as philosophical accomplishments that exposed the deficiencies of Chicano nationalism and misogyny and helped create alternative methodologies. These solutions have been characterized as enabling a resistant, progressive way forward not only in debates about literature and art but also in debates about politics. I too consider these texts to be immensely important, but I will show why they have not been as resistant as has been claimed.

I am interested in placing Hurricane Season at the center of a discussion seeking to rethink a discrete genealogy of narrative form in Latin America and the problems embedded within structural functions of that form. The book's visibility is indicative of changes in the practice of literary form in Mexican and Latin American fiction, within which the book is at the same time illustrative and unique.

The "text" crystallized into something applied to another object, a tool for producing meaning and making it work. It rarely occupied the position of object of inquiry. Indeed, the fact that this critical commonplace has become so naturalized says a good deal about the state of development of literary studies in Brazil, since this points simultaneously to an institutional achievement (the capacity to transmit the comprehension of a sophisticated conceptual framework) and to an intellectual weakness (the inability to think meta-theoretically).