Trash Animals and the Picaresque Myth
On Santiago Nazarian’s Mastigando humanos
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 24225296 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Fernando Varela (0000-0003-2574-579X, Texas Lutheran University) |
| Year | 2026 |
| Pages | 1-15 |
| Publication date | 2026-07-31 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Latin American Research Review (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0023-8791 • E-ISSN: 1542-4278 |
| Publisher | Cambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1017/lar.2026.10154 |
| OpenAlex | W7171927667 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 12 |
Published in 2006, Santiago Nazarian’s novel Mastigando humanos: Um romance psicodélico ( Chewing Humans: A Psychedelic Novel , 2006) details the misadventures of an alligator named Victório who lives in the city sewers and eventually develops a desire to write an autobiography. Structured from a first-person point of view, he recounts his experiences eating trash while coexisting with other animals, his abduction by university researchers, and his struggles to finish his autobiography. This article analyzes Nazarian’s novel through a picaresque lens and connects the literary character of the picaro with trash animals, or urban-based animals that have adopted trash as part of their diet. It argues that Victório’s life embodies the picaro’s penchant for dissimulation, estrangement, and self-fashioning through the act of writing. More broadly, it claims that Mastigando humanos underscores the picaresque myth’s ecological orientation by portraying trash animals as picaros who devise ingenious strategies of survival within the city.
alligators · dissimulation · ecological literature · estrangement · pícaro · self-fashioning · survival strategies · urban animals · Urban ecology · Ecocriticism and Environmental Literature · Latin American Literature Analysis · Latin American Literature Studies
| Highly cited | No |
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