Marxist Specters, Uruguayan Monsters, and the Undead: Santiago Sanguinetti's Zombi manifiesto

Authors

• Sarah M. Misemer

Abstract

Santiago Sanguinetti’s Zombi Manifesto (2023), awarded the Premio Nacional de Literatura by the Ministry of Education and Culture in Uruguay in 2024, is a complex look at Uruguay’s military and political past through a resurrection of the dead, who emerge as zombies seeking revenge/social justice. The play unfolds as Pedro and Matilde visit the Trinidad cemetery in Trinidad, Flores Uruguay, where Pedro likes to read works by Marx, Lenin, and other leftist figures. Unexpectedly the dead come back to life while listening to Pedro, reviving, in effect, the horrors from the past dictatorship as they listen to Pedro. Sanguinetti thus inverts the search for the missing dead—Uruguayan citizens abducted and killed during the dictatorship in Uruguay between 1973-1985—into a hunt for ex-military soldier zombies now escaping from the cemetery.

If these zombies—undead, grotesque bodies—are monsters that represent living stories (how the monster came to be and the cultural use it serves), then Sanguinetti’s play makes claims on Latin America by insisting its political/ideological monster is the zombie, and in his play the zombies return and engage with history, leftist politics, trauma, and social justice, by moving between two generations, between life and death. Sanguinetti’s zombies return and provoke audiences to re-examine the political/historical through a present-day manifesto of monstrosity.

Recommended Citation

Misemer, Sarah M. (2026) "Marxist Specters, Uruguayan Monsters, and the Undead: Santiago Sanguinetti's Zombi manifiesto," Comparative Drama: Vol. 60: Iss. 3, Article 3.
Available at: https://scholarworks.wmich.edu/compdr/vol60/iss3/3