http://ojs.gc.cuny.edu/index.php/lljournal/issue/current/showToc ROUTES TO RUIN Benita Sampedro Vizcaya Hofstra University The title of this essay capitalizes on the inherent “tensions between the commonly cited homophones” (Wilson, Sandru and Welsh 3)1 routes and roots, rutas y raíces, in an attempt to exponentially multiply the semantic potential of the ruin. Of course, the use of this trope is not completely new,2 but it is fundamentally relevant and pertinent here, for it posits the intimate relation between space and time, between history and place, and it is conducive to a historiography that alters the conventional linear models of colonial and modern conceptions of progress. Ruins, rust, and remnants, for their part, are a privileged space for questioning the past (colonial or not) as well as the present, and a propitious locus for interrogating disciplinary purposes and practices. I will argue that ghost-like villages and vacuumed-like empty islands can be as eloquent about the past as archives—as we commonly understand them—statistics, and libraries. They speak of the politics and experience of abandonment, and they are “endowed with a capacity to penetrate our sensibility” (González-Ruibal 2005: 144) –and eventually move us to action— that other kinds of data may lack. The metonymic relevance of the ruin is fully activated by the fact that we are left with only material fragments to work with, fragmented lives, narratives and chronologies, and always fragmentary and partial written records. Ruins, as alternative archives in and of themselves, alter the sites of official documentation, shifting the focus of the political, military, and other manifestations of power.3 Equally, they are evocative enough to alter narrative conventions, questioning traditional empiricism as the legitimate practice par excellence; exploring, instead, new methodological horizons and affiliative forms of connecting the past with the present, and the researchers’ involvement with both. The ‘routes’ of my title, meanwhile, are intended to suggest