Wounded from Within: Trauma and the Body in Yesika Salgado’s and Rigoberto González’s Latinx Life Writings

Abstract This essay develops the conceptual framework of the wound as both a critical and interpretive method for reading the life writings of Salvadoran American poet Yesika Salgado and queer Chicano author Rigoberto González. Drawing on insights from trauma studies, somatic theory, and Latinx literary and cultural criticism, I examine how their works register the biological and internalized reverberations of historical, intergenerational, and intersectional trauma. I argue that Latinx life writing interrogates Western biomedical and psychoanalytic paradigms by translating harm and suffering into corporeal language, affective poetics, and physiological imagery. Advancing the concept of the “ hungry soma,” the essay considers how the representation of disordered eating, inherited grief, and bodily manifestations of pain operate as strategies of endurance and as forms of political testimonio . By foregrounding embodied narration, poetics, and the racialized and gendered dimensions of interiorized trauma, I underscore the curative, epistemic, and political contributions of Latinx literature within broader conversations on intersectional racialization, health humanities, and social justice.