Antonio Bernal is a Guatemalan refugee in Los Angeles haunted by memories of his wife and child, who were murdered at the hands of a man marked with yellow ink. In a park near Antonio's apartment, Guillermo Longoria extends his arm and reveals a sinister tattoo—yellow pelt, black spots, red mouth. It is the sign of the death squad, the Jaguar Battalion of the Guatemalan army. This chance encounter between Antonio and his family's killer ignites a psychological showdown between these two men. Each will discover that the war in Central America has migrated with them as they are engulfed by the quemazones—"the great burning" of the Los Angeles riots. A tragic tale of loss and destiny in the underbelly of an American city, The Tattooed Soldier is Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter Héctor Tobar's mesmerizing exploration of violence and the marks it leaves upon us.

In a shabby apartment in downtown Los Angeles, Antonio Bernal waits to be evicted. It is the final defeat in a series of blows that drove him from Guatemala after a death squad murdered his wife and child, a boy of two. Not far from Antonio?s apartment, Guillermo Longoria is playing chess. Utterly absorbed in the game, he stretches for the queen revealing the tattoo on his arm which bears witness to his past - as a member of the Jaguar Battalion of the guatemalan Army. The Tattooed Soldier tells the riveting story of two haunted men and the fatal intersecting of their lives.

A Guatemalan refugee whose family was killed by a death squad spots one of the killers playing chess in a park in Los Angeles and plots revenge. The denouement comes during one of the city's riots.

SuperSummary, a modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, offers high-quality study guides for challenging works of literature. This 34-page guide for "The Tattooed Soldier" by Hector Tobar includes detailed chapter summaries and analysis covering 19 chapters, as well as several more in-depth sections of expert-written literary analysis. Featured content includes commentary on major characters, 10 important quotes, discussion topics, and key themes like Marking or Being Marked and The Experience of Latino Immigrants.

The Latina/o population in the United States has become the largest minority group in the nation. Latinas/os are a mosaic of people, representing different nationalities and religions as well as different levels of education and income. This edited volume uses a multidisciplinary approach to document how Latinas and Latinos have changed and continue to change the face of America. It also includes critical methodological and theoretical information related to the study of the Latino/a population in the United States.

In 1899, the United Fruit Company (UFCO) was officially incorporated in Boston, Massachusetts, beginning an era of economic, diplomatic, and military interventions in Central America. This event marked the inception of the struggle for economic, political, and cultural autonomy in Central America as well as an era of homegrown inequities, injustices, and impunities to which Central Americans have responded in creative and critical ways. This juncture also set the conditions for the creation of the Transisthmus—a material, cultural, and symbolic site of vast intersections of people, products, and narratives. Taking 1899 as her point of departure, Ana Patricia Rodríguez offers a comprehensive, comparative, and meticulously researched book covering more than one hundred years, between 1899 and 2007, of modern cultural and literary production and modern empire-building in Central America. She examines the grand narratives of (anti)imperialism, revolution, subalternity, globalization, impunity, transnational migration, and diaspora, as well as other discursive, historical, and material configurations of the region beyond its geophysical and political confines. Focusing in particular on how the material productions and symbolic tropes of cacao, coffee, indigo, bananas, canals, waste, and transmigrant labor have shaped the transisthmian cultural and literary imaginaries, Rodríguez develops new methodological approaches for studying cultural production in Central America and its diasporas. Monumental in scope and relentlessly impassioned, this work offers new critical readings of Central American narratives and contributes to the growing field of Central American studies.