Survival Scars and Solidarity in Emma Pérez’s Forgetting the Alamo, Or, Blood Memory

In the final chapter, “Survival Scars and Solidarity in Emma Pérez’s Forgetting the Alamo, Or, Blood Memory,” I explore another genre that can be employed as a tool of social protest literature, the historical novel, and the importance of queering survival in Chicana/o/x literature. Using Pérez’s rape revenge tale as a window into the decolonial imaginary, I illustrate the power of cicatrix as a metaphor. In Blood Memory, Pérez “writes Chicanas into history” through a queer Tejana lesbian protagonist with a self-inflicted wound that will not heal. She is a survivor of interpersonal violence, and a witness to numerous acts of trauma inflicted upon Mexican, Indigenous, and Black people in the short-lived Republic of Texas. By renegotiating the terms of the Western genre through the lens of the decolonial imaginary, Pérez has demonstrated the power of storytelling to transform our perspectives on women and survival in the borderlands. The cicatrix is thus a powerful metaphor for the healing process of radical storytelling and the crafting of survival narratives that speak to and for a wounded collective. Survival narratives like Forgetting the Alamo, Or, Blood Memory are, in and of themselves, transformative but also point to a world in which the outcomes of social justice struggles are grounded in a variety of artistic, political, and academic interventions.