ABSTRACT
Among Latin American literary texts, several well-known 20th-century pieces delve into the question of honor killing. These texts, perhaps the best-known of the period to examine the theme, exemplify the literary treatment of the subject to this point in Latin America. It may be underscored or subtly inferred in some texts that because the crime results from impulse, period judicial codes would view the circumstances as mitigating, resulting in the withdrawal of formal charges. In others premeditation is exemplified, and in these the author may expand the question into a philosophical examination of period social norms or of individual pathologies. The particular transgressions leading to the honor killings either stem from heated reactions to sexual infidelity within a marriage or, more broadly, from a grave insult against a family’s honor, hence the term “honor killing”. In each of the pieces examined save one, the perpetrator is male. The texts range in purview from simple crime drama to philosophical treatments to detective fiction with various ranges of authorial purpose. Above and beyond the common theme, a single unifying feature is that none of the pieces appeals to the reader to empathize with the criminal or to view the circumstances of the crime or the impulses of the murderer as either mitigating or justifiable. Another common feature of these literary works is that each one involves immigrants to Latin America, raising questions of scapegoating.
