PT Data wrangler

Tag: Mexico

  • From Despair to Consciousness

    From Despair to Consciousness

    In April 2019, #metoo took hold of social media in Mexico. In response, a collective of women working in publishing released a statement with specific demands for harassment-free spaces, workplace protocols against sexual and emotional violence, and equal representation and pay in their diverse professional spaces and activities. Gabriela Jauregui reflects on #MujeresJuntasMarabunta.

     

    I write to you from this side of the screen, from this side of the page, from the despair of having lived in fear and having at the same time broken with that fear. I write to you with a radical tenderness for others and also for myself, which in my body and my mind implies ‘not to collapse when faced with our contradictions’ and also ‘not to allow our existential demons to become permanent cynicism’ (from the Radical Tenderness Manifesto). 

    Each word I write every single day, each word which you are now reading on this page, implies time stolen back from fear.

    That fear stole my peace, my health, my writing time and my time for thinking – for I am a woman who, like many others, has survived the physical, psychological and economical violence of an ex-partner. Amongst many other things, that fear silenced me. But, as my mother used to tell me when I was a child: ‘Do not fear fear.’ Now I am taking this and more back from fear. 

    So here I go, stealing these words from fear and silence, on my own time recovered, echoing what Argentinean anthropologist Rita Segato has written in a speech regarding feminism, literature and #metoo movements in Latin America, where we are moved from the feeling of ‘despair to one of consciousness’, and where ‘our logic must be tragic, in the sense that it can coexist alongside inconsistencies, with incompatible truths, with the equation a and non-a, both opposite and true and simultaneous. And therefore always, always equipped with the vital intensity of disobedience.’ 

    What I can disobey now, what we all disobey in our tragic and inconsistent and collective logic, is patriarchy’s pact of silence.

    We can also disobey the rush of social media, which demands that we act quickly and sometimes in ways that are neglectful of ourselves and others; and we continue to disobey those who say ‘what women should be doing is’, those who say ‘go file a lawsuit with Papa State so He may defend you.’ 

    In the months since the #metoo movement started in Mexico, several writers, many (older) (famous) (male) writers have written articles saying we should all move on to the post-#metoo era (reminding me of those who insist that we should ‘just get over it’ and move into the post-racial era, right?); or that now that women have power they don’t know what to do with it; or that instead of burning men at the stake women should go file proper legal suits within the official judicial system. 

    (They often fail to note that in Mexico, impunity for crimes in the justice system is estimated at 95% by the most conservative studies, sometimes up to 99% – and when women are involved this is especially the case.) 

    Many, if not all, of these male writers who want to ‘move on’ have argued that quotas to achieve parity are absurd, that women do not need these ‘humiliating’, ‘useless’ measures (even though in literature, most prizes and publications are overwhelmingly male-dominated, still, today, in the 21st century, yes). But they stress that we can count on their solidarity with regards to femicide.

    Well thank goodness for that, dear colleagues, we are grateful for your moral support at the very least in that regard – especially in Mexico where the femicide rate is currently at 9 women per day.

    The questions I ask these writers is this: do you honestly think that radical violence against women remains completely isolated and unlinked from the privileged culture of literature? Does the world of culture not reflect and mirror what happens on the streets? Does our writing not generate narratives and uphold certain world views? Or is it actively fighting this reality? Is it any surprise then, really, that abuses of all sorts are committed by men in positions of power in the literary field, too?

    And despite everything, no, our logic cannot be that of the punitive State, cannot be that of the voraciously capitalist social media. Women cannot speed up the process (as much as we might sometimes like to, for this is a painful process for everyone). And so, if #metoo speaks to the State, as Segato says, but also to the voluble abstraction of Public Opinion, in Mexico, a sister hashtag was created almost simultaneously: #MujeresJuntasMarabunta. This hashtag does not only speak to the State or Public Opinion, it speaks to us, men and women and gender non-conforming people, and interpellates us in a horizontal, ineluctable and intimate way.

    (The hashtag’s name is derived from a well-known expression in Spanish stating, Mujeres juntas, ni difuntas – loosely translated as women together, not even dead – and mutates it to Mujeres juntas, marabunta – women together are marabunta, or legion).

    Referring to both sister hashtags, but, and also, to the enormous amount of organizing and community involvement behind both, in The End of Women’s Silence, Cristina Rivera Garza asks,

    Did we know these stories? Of course we did, sometimes by word of mouth, sometimes in our own flesh […] Were the rest aware? Of course they were, sometimes by word of mouth, sometimes in their own flesh. […] Thus amplifying voices and extending the echoes of other shouts, all these stories dressed in sounds and letters with proper and improper names, in the public sphere, including twitter, took on a weight that in many ways felt like horror. […] It was a world founded on women’s silence. It was a world that required the most intimate silence from women, there where they are fatally wounded, in order to keep functioning. 

    Ergo we disobey.

    To me, and I am sure to most of us, everything that has happened with the #metoo writer’s movement and beyond, does not have the aim to destroy anyone’s lives – neither women’s nor men’s – but rather to help make visible a structural violence and to build a world where, as the Zapatistas would say, many worlds can coexist.

    A world in which the coupling of fear/power is not what mediates our relationships, but rather desire, openness, vulnerability, curiosity, imagination. 

    Indeed, if ‘in the beginning was the word’ and it is from and with words that we create and reflect upon the world we inhabit, that we imagine other possible worlds, then what has been made clear is that we do so in the midst of violence that reflects the general murderous macho violence of our countries. But it is also clear that, despite that violence, women keep writing. And how do we keep writing? Together.

    As Cristina Rivera Garza continues in her text, ‘Our stories, jumbled. Our voices, all at the same time. It was so difficult to distinguish between what was your own and what was everyone’s, we will say with that great smile on our lips inspired by the community.’ This diverse, plural community of women writers, translators, editors, festival directors, press and media managers, and all women working with words that make up the #MujeresJuntasMarabunta, seemed unheard of until now. Now this community unites its voices and lifts its communal pen to change the structures that kill us, disappear us, mutilate us, silence us, invisibilize us. As the Collective Words of the #MujeresJuntasMarabunta state, ‘We are generating a counternarrative for gender equality. We are rewriting the future.’ 

    Gabriela Jauregui (Mexico City, 1979) is the author of the short story collection, La Memoria de las cosas (Sexto Piso), the hybrid books ManyFiestas (Gato Negro), Leash Seeks Lost Bitch (Song Cave), and the poetry collection Controlled Decay (Akashic Books/Black Goat Press). She is also coauthor and editor of the feminist anthology Tsunami (Sexto Piso) and Taller de Taquimecanografía (Tumbona). She holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Southern California and and MFA from the University of California Riverside. In 2017, she was selected as one of the best writers in Latin America as part of the Hay Festival’s Bogotá39 list. She currently lives in Mexico City.

    For more about the women writer’s collective actions, please check out #mujeresjuntasmarabunta and read the statement.

    Photo credit: Víctor Benítez

  • The labyrinth

    Translated by Bill Swainson with Ángel Gurría-Quintana.

    2006 was an extraordinary year for Mexico and for reporters like me. The country mobilised from the mountains in the south to the border in the north, with demands for justice and democratisation breaking out everywhere. My year began in Chiapas on 1 January, when Subcomandante Marcos, riding a motorbike, started a tour called ‘The Other Campaign’ which sought to unite the revolutionary left. In February, an explosion in a coal mine in the north mobilised hundreds of families who demanded the rescue of 65 trapped miners. On 3 May, farm-workers from San Salvador Atenco won a pitched battle with the police, who returned the next day to quash them with a brutality that cost the life of a child and an adolescent and involved sexual assaults against 26 women, all attributed to the police.

    On 14 June, a rebellion broke out in the city of Oaxaca, which would soon expel its governor and set up a short-lived but memorable popular government similar to the Paris Commune. On 2 July, the ruling party candidate Felipe Calderón won the presidential election. His adversary Andrés Manuel López Obrador, refusing to recognise the result, organised three marches involving hundreds of thousands of people and a sit-in on the Paseo de la Reforma, one of Mexico City’s main avenues. Reluctant to accept defeat, López Obrador declared himself ‘legitimate president’; he would compete again in 2012 and lose again, this time to Enrique Peña Nieto.

    I covered 2006 by land and air. The newspaper Reforma, where I was then working, assigned me to report on almost all the big stories of that year. I followed Marcos into the mountains, López Obrador by road, and presidents Vicente Fox and Calderón in planes and helicopters. I reported on the negotiations in the Ministry of the Interior between the federal government and the popular authorities of Oaxaca, and sent despatches from internet cafés in villages across the country. Great events were taking place In Mexico.  Covering them and reporting on them was relatively safe.

    That all came to an end shortly afterwards.

    In December 2006, Felipe Calderón declared the ‘war on drugs’ and sent the military out into the streets. Mexico’s mobilised and rebellious countenance vanished and a trail of death covered the country’s face instead. In six years there were 100,000 fatalities. Many roads became death traps: if you were captured by some drug baron’s hit squad they could make you ‘disappear’ – that is, kidnap you, kill you and bury you in an unmarked grave.

    In 2014 I found myself on the front line. With 15 other journalists I joined the ‘Observation Mission’ which went to the state of Veracruz to investigate the circumstances in which Gregorio Jiménez de la Cruz had died. Gregorio (Goyo, as he was affectionately known) was the tenth reporter murdered in Veracruz during Governor Javier Duarte’s administration. We thought we had seen the worst of it. He was kidnapped on 5 February, and six days later his mutilated body was found, bearing marks of torture. He had been decapitated.

    In Coatzacoalcos, where Goyo was reporting, the same phenomenon had occurred as in much of the rest of the country: organised crime and the authorities had merged to become indistinguishable (we called it ‘narco-politics’). Kidnappings had become epidemic. Children, Central American migrants, oil engineers, doctors – almost everyone was a tempting prey. Goyo followed the trail of one of these bands of kidnappers. And he published his story. Going public cost him his life.

    A closer look showed us that the injustices began a long time before Goyo’s death. He earned 20 pesos (less than £1) for each published article. His salary as a reporter was 3,500 pesos per month (not even £200). He supplemented his income as a photographer for weddings and baptisms. He lived in Coatzacoalcos, one of Mexico’s industrial zones, but he had previously lived in a wooden house in a swamp, which had sunk when the river flooded.

    There are thousands of reporters in Mexico like Gregorio: threatened, on starvation wages and exposed to corruption (authorities and criminals offer them money or bullets in exchange for their pen or their silence).

    On 1 July 2012 Enrique Peña Nieto won the presidency. The situation did not improve for journalism; it got worse. The journalist Carmen Aristegui published her report ‘Peña Nieto’s White House’, in which she rigorously documented the existence of a $7,000,000 residence, owned by the First Lady, which had been constructed by and bought from contractors widely favoured by Peña Nieto’s government. The president was not submitted to an investigation; instead, Aristegui and her colleagues were sacked from her popular radio programme.

    Journalism in Mexico confronts three demons: narco-politics, censorship and corruption. And corruption is not a minor matter: long before Aristegui’s dismissal, local and national newspapers have tended to follow the government line. The front pages are full of the vacuous declarations of government officials while opposition movements like CNTE, the teachers’ union, which resists change to teachers’ employment conditions, are slandered. Journalists faithful to the government open internet portals and make thousands of pesos from official publicity. Those colleagues are far removed from the dangers that faced Goyo. They attend the parties of mayors, governors or ministers and eulogise them in their articles.

    The Sorrows of Mexico is committed to a different journalism. Orthodox in its democratic principles. Literary in its aesthetic aspirations. Firm in its repudiation of the abuse of power. Lydia Cacho, Anabel Hernández, Sergio González Rodríguez, Marcela Turati and Diego Osorno are some of the bravest – and most at risk – journalists in the country. Juan Villoro is one of the most brilliant writers in the Spanish language. The authors write about the crucial issues of the country – such as the disappearance of the 43 Ayotzinapa teacher training students – and about issues that are otherwise invisible in the media: street children, women forced into prostitution, scapegoats invented by the state to cover up the real criminals.

    On July 20, only days before this article was written, Pedro Tamayo died. He was the 19th journalist to be murdered in Veracruz in less than six years. Harassment of the press, censorship and the collusion of press and power all continue. Nevertheless, as The Sorrows of Mexico shows, there is a Mexico that resists. That sheds light and speaks up. A horizon beyond the labyrinth.

    Read more about The Sorrows of Mexico on the World Bookshelf.

    Emiliano Ruiz Parra, Diego Enrique Osorno and Sergio González Rodríguez discuss The Sorrows of Mexico at Edinburgh International Book Festival on Saturday 27 August. Find out more about PEN-supported writers at Edinburgh.

    The authors will also discuss the book at an event at Waterstones Piccadilly on Wednesday 31 August. The event is free, but requires an RSVP – find out more here.

  • The UK gets its FIL

    Translator Jethro Soutar reports from the 2015 Guadalajara International Book Fair, which this year took place from 28 November to 6 December and is the biggest annual literary event in the Spanish-speaking world.

    Part of PEN Atlas’s Mexico focus #MXUK2015.

    The Guadalajara Book Fair in Mexico, known as FIL (Feria Internacional del Libro) is like no other book fair in the world. For a start, it’s enormous, second only to Frankfurt in terms of exhibitor numbers. But that’s not what’s most striking: the first thing you notice is the number of kids. According to the organisers, 792,000 visitors attended the festival this year, around 80% of whom were children and young people. Some come on school trips, though not reluctantly; many come off their own backs. They come to meet authors, hear stories, buy books; they come to run around and flirt; they come because it’s fun – because books are cool!

    It makes for a rowdy affair. As he took to the lectern at an event entitled ‘Inspired By Shakespeare’, Sir Andrew Motion said it was the noisiest backdrop he’d experienced in 35 years of poetry readings.

    Motion was joined on stage by John Burnside, Inua Ellams and Helen Mort, all part of the UK’s Guest of Honour delegation. The UK’s appearance marked the culmination of a year of cultural and trade exchange between Mexico and the UK.

    Salman Rushdie opened the festival, giving the keynote speech and receiving the Carlos Fuentes Medal of Honour. Rushdie lauded magic realism and lamented the state of modern fiction, in which ‘hunger games’ are played, Da Vinci is a code and Elena Ferrante writes about herself. He called for less realism, advising young writers to do the opposite of writing about what they know. This went down well with FIL’s audience, predominantly Latin Americans, magic realists par excellence.

    Rushdie also spoke of storytelling’s capacity to civilise, even to overpower tyrants and their assassins. Mexico, of course, has a rich history of reportage; very real stories being told in the face of extreme danger. On the final night of the festival, Sergio González Rodríguez was awarded the Fernando Benítez National Prize for Cultural Journalism. González Rodríguez, who appeared at the Edinburgh Book Festival earlier this year, has written extensively about femicide in Ciudad Juárez, and has repeatedly been threatened, beaten and kidnapped for his troubles. It was a sombre reminder that, for all the fun of the fair, Mexico has a number of urgent problems. Crime writers Val McDermid, Claire McGowan and Louise Welsh had been intrigued to learn from a taxi driver that Guadalajara is safe because it’s where the narco capos house their families.

    Earlier in the day, in a talk entitled ‘The Devil’s in the Detail: Forensic Evidence’, McDermid and McGowan had talked about miscarriages of justice that can arise from an over-reliance on science. Alas, such miscarriages could be considered a luxury in Mexico. Welsh was part of the ‘Capturing the Contemporary’ panel, alongside Laura Bates, Owen Jones and Sunjeev Sahota. They chatted engagingly about discrimination based on class, race, gender and sexuality. A Mexican audience member asked what could be done about women who subscribe to macho attitudes, and although Bates replied wisely and eloquently – that we shouldn’t blame women for having such attitudes, but should look to the societies that encourage them to do so – one couldn’t help but think of the gulf that exists between Mexico and the UK in this regard.

    Yet there was common ground to celebrate too. UK events were well-attended across the board, and those of Irvine Welsh were blockbuster affairs: hordes rushed to the stage at the end, waving books to sign, camera-phones to pose for. Yes, it had to do with Trainspotting, the movie, but also with what he writes about, the human dramas behind drugs and crime. Of course there’s much more to Mexico than drugs and crime, and events such as Naomi Alderman ’s ‘How to write a Blog’ tutorial likewise drew rooms full of young folk.

    The authors chosen to represent the UK were diverse, the range of genres and topics broad. There was an academic programme to complement the literary one, free concerts outside FIL every night, film screenings at the university and art at Musa (Museo de los Artes).

    The Musa building is home to two magnificent murals by José Clemente Orozco and played temporary host to exhibitions by David Hockney, George Blacklock and Gary Oldman. The bright colours and swirling shapes of Blacklock’s beautiful series of ‘Slipping Glimpsers’ seemed to echo Mayan body and temple painting; Hockney’s ‘Death in Harlem’, from his ‘Rake’s Progress’, brought Frida Kahlo to mind. Wilful interpretations perhaps: I was actively looking for connections, deliberately seeking parallels between the UK and Mexico. No bad thing. Surely that’s a hallmark of a successful cross-cultural event.

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    Jethro Soutar is a translator of Spanish and Portuguese. His translation of By Night The Mountain Burns by Juan Tomás Ávila Laurel (published by And Other Stories) was shortlisted for the 2015 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize. It also received a PEN Award, as did his translations of Hotel Brasil by Frei Betto (published by Bitter Lemon Press in 2014) and The Ultimate Tragedy by Abdulai Silá (to be published by Dedalus in 2016). Jethro also co-founded Ragpicker Press and co-edited its debut title, The Football Crónicas, a collection of translated short-form writing from Latin America.

    Part of PEN Atlas’s Mexico focus #MXUK2015.

    Mexico is currently the most dangerous country in the world for journalists. Find out more about English PEN’s campaigning focus on Mexico here.

    Other articles by Jethro Soutar:

     

  • 'No se mata la verdad' / 'You cannot kill the truth'

    Translated from Spanish by Sara Mellor

    A couple of weeks ago I got a phone call from a young colleague. Rubén Espinosa asked me how one spends so many years living in fear, how one learns to process an endless succession of death threats – some of them veiled, others direct and crystal clear.

    For this young photo reporter (a correspondent for Cuartoscuro photographic news agency and Proceso magazine), sleeplessness, loss of appetite and depression (which he called sadness in an attempt to downplay its punishing daily presence) were enemies he had to get used to living with.

    I recommended a therapist specializing in posttraumatic stress (PTSD), a disorder that is so often the collateral damage of the work of journalists and those professionally involved in defending human rights.

    PTSD is that shady figure who takes up residence in the life of anyone who experiences either sudden instances of violence or intense and systematic forms of it. PTSD puts both the bodily integrity and emotional wellbeing of the victim at risk.

    Rubén had learned to coach his colleagues in matters of security: how to graphically document injustices and civil protests, employing strategies to safeguard both their personal safety and photographic material (the hard evidence of reality).

    Along with some colleagues, both male and female, Rubén received help from the organization Article 19 to escape Veracruz and go into exile. Together with the other brave photojournalists who formed part of the #FotoperiodistasMX group, he decided not to give up, despite the very real and disturbing death threats he had received over the previous years for doing a good job in Veracruz; it’s all documented.

    Along with some colleagues, Rubén was forced to move to México City where he lived with a group of close friends, including the activist, artist and anthropologist Nadia Vera, who was part of Xalapa’s #YoSoy132 movement.

    ‘Considérate enemigo del pueblo [Consider yourself enemy of the people],’ Veracruz’s government spokesperson said to Rubén as he blocked his entry into a press conference in which governor Javier Duarte was due to speak.

    This happened after the publication of the now famous front cover of Proceso magazine, which depicts Duarte pulling a threatening, contemptuous face, and wearing a police cap. At the time the photo was taken, the people of Veracruz were already protesting against terrible government practices, corruption, impunity, and the lack of public safety. Their protests were vocalised in now well-known slogans which, according to Espinosa himself, enraged the governor’s security team: many of the slogans made reference to Duarte’s weight problem, and his irascible, violent, racist and sexist nature.

    The truth is that Rubén Espinosa was a good photographer. He took hundreds of important photographs. With a single image he achieved what no amount of words could have achieved in any serious way on a news page: without filters, he let the real Duarte shine through: the clenched-fist metalanguage, the furious gaze, his name and station embroidered onto his shirt. ‘Javier Duarte. Governor,’ read the red letters across his chest – and let no one question it.

    ‘Governor’ reads his cap, complete with police badge: a gold star, symbol of power and social control. Yet, according to the photo’s author, this wasn’t the root of Duarte’s anger: for the governor, the real affront was the close-up that clearly exhibits his morbid obesity (a source of insecurity to Duarte, who has always feared being the target of mockery). Hence why he has an official photographer, whose responsibility it is to always photograph him from favourable angles.

    It might seem trivial or ludicrous to state that many leaders take personal offence at the journalists (both male and female) who expose those unmistakable aspects of their personality that make them feel insecure, and which they take pains to conceal. We’re not only talking about physiology, but about the gestures that betray everyone, no matter how hard one tries to conceal them.

    Rubén told me that the same spokesperson relayed to him the governor’s outrage at another famous Cuartoscuro close-up in which Duarte’s eyes appear to be popping out of his face, like a kind of incensed gargoyle; in the same photo he can be seen launching his body at a group of journalists who are questioning him, and baring his teeth in a clear sign of attack.

    Over and over again, they warned Rubén not to stay in Veracruz, that he was on the enemies’ black list.

    Rubén never received therapy for his angst, or got to work through the anxiety he took on hearing the fears of countless colleagues and the daily threats they received, for being journalists or human rights activists. He was murdered on Friday 31 July alongside activist Nadia Vera – a brave young woman with a firm voice and a spark in her eyes – who challenged the powers that be and injustices in Xalapa, Veracruz. Their bodies, along with those of Alejandra Negrete, Yesenia Quiróz and Mile Virginia Martín, were found tortured and shot. The weapon used was a military 9mm firearm and the shots were clean: both firm characteristics of hired assassins.

    Only those who live under death threats know how the clock marks the hours differently. Not only does it imply living with fear, but it also goads the spirit of self-censorship that makes us ask: Is it worth it? Is exposing yet another atrocity in a country of despicable leaders really worth the risk? I can only answer that it is always worth telling the truth, always worth fighting against ignominy and trying to build a country in which it is worth growing up, living, loving.

    And then there is the ever-present guilt of us men and women who survive: we wear that guilt like a tattoo when the threats are shared, until one terrible night you learn of the openly forewarned death of that person you just spoke to on the phone; a person who had faith, who believed in ethics; a person with whom you repeated like a mantra: They won’t dare kill you: not after all the denunciations against him; not after you’ve openly pointed the finger at your potential murderer. They won’t dare kill you.

    I can hear Rubén’s voice, and the voices of many other colleagues singing along side by side at a solidarity march: ‘No se mata la verdad matando periodistas.’ / ‘You cannot kill the truth killing journalists.’

    You can read this piece in the original Spanish on Aristegui Noticias: http://aristeguinoticias.com/0308/mexico/no-se-mata-la-verdad-articulo-de-lydia-cacho/

    English PEN members have joined writers from around the world in condemning the murder of Rubén Espinosa. Read the letter here.

  • ‘No se mata la verdad’ / ‘You cannot kill the truth’

    Translated from Spanish by Sara Mellor

    A couple of weeks ago I got a phone call from a young colleague. Rubén Espinosa asked me how one spends so many years living in fear, how one learns to process an endless succession of death threats – some of them veiled, others direct and crystal clear.

    For this young photo reporter (a correspondent for Cuartoscuro photographic news agency and Proceso magazine), sleeplessness, loss of appetite and depression (which he called sadness in an attempt to downplay its punishing daily presence) were enemies he had to get used to living with.

    I recommended a therapist specializing in posttraumatic stress (PTSD), a disorder that is so often the collateral damage of the work of journalists and those professionally involved in defending human rights.

    PTSD is that shady figure who takes up residence in the life of anyone who experiences either sudden instances of violence or intense and systematic forms of it. PTSD puts both the bodily integrity and emotional wellbeing of the victim at risk.

    Rubén had learned to coach his colleagues in matters of security: how to graphically document injustices and civil protests, employing strategies to safeguard both their personal safety and photographic material (the hard evidence of reality).

    Along with some colleagues, both male and female, Rubén received help from the organization Article 19 to escape Veracruz and go into exile. Together with the other brave photojournalists who formed part of the #FotoperiodistasMX group, he decided not to give up, despite the very real and disturbing death threats he had received over the previous years for doing a good job in Veracruz; it’s all documented.

    Along with some colleagues, Rubén was forced to move to México City where he lived with a group of close friends, including the activist, artist and anthropologist Nadia Vera, who was part of Xalapa’s #YoSoy132 movement.

    ‘Considérate enemigo del pueblo [Consider yourself enemy of the people],’ Veracruz’s government spokesperson said to Rubén as he blocked his entry into a press conference in which governor Javier Duarte was due to speak.

    This happened after the publication of the now famous front cover of Proceso magazine, which depicts Duarte pulling a threatening, contemptuous face, and wearing a police cap. At the time the photo was taken, the people of Veracruz were already protesting against terrible government practices, corruption, impunity, and the lack of public safety. Their protests were vocalised in now well-known slogans which, according to Espinosa himself, enraged the governor’s security team: many of the slogans made reference to Duarte’s weight problem, and his irascible, violent, racist and sexist nature.

    The truth is that Rubén Espinosa was a good photographer. He took hundreds of important photographs. With a single image he achieved what no amount of words could have achieved in any serious way on a news page: without filters, he let the real Duarte shine through: the clenched-fist metalanguage, the furious gaze, his name and station embroidered onto his shirt. ‘Javier Duarte. Governor,’ read the red letters across his chest – and let no one question it.

    ‘Governor’ reads his cap, complete with police badge: a gold star, symbol of power and social control. Yet, according to the photo’s author, this wasn’t the root of Duarte’s anger: for the governor, the real affront was the close-up that clearly exhibits his morbid obesity (a source of insecurity to Duarte, who has always feared being the target of mockery). Hence why he has an official photographer, whose responsibility it is to always photograph him from favourable angles.

    It might seem trivial or ludicrous to state that many leaders take personal offence at the journalists (both male and female) who expose those unmistakable aspects of their personality that make them feel insecure, and which they take pains to conceal. We’re not only talking about physiology, but about the gestures that betray everyone, no matter how hard one tries to conceal them.

    Rubén told me that the same spokesperson relayed to him the governor’s outrage at another famous Cuartoscuro close-up in which Duarte’s eyes appear to be popping out of his face, like a kind of incensed gargoyle; in the same photo he can be seen launching his body at a group of journalists who are questioning him, and baring his teeth in a clear sign of attack.

    Over and over again, they warned Rubén not to stay in Veracruz, that he was on the enemies’ black list.

    Rubén never received therapy for his angst, or got to work through the anxiety he took on hearing the fears of countless colleagues and the daily threats they received, for being journalists or human rights activists. He was murdered on Friday 31 July alongside activist Nadia Vera – a brave young woman with a firm voice and a spark in her eyes – who challenged the powers that be and injustices in Xalapa, Veracruz. Their bodies, along with those of Alejandra Negrete, Yesenia Quiróz and Mile Virginia Martín, were found tortured and shot. The weapon used was a military 9mm firearm and the shots were clean: both firm characteristics of hired assassins.

    Only those who live under death threats know how the clock marks the hours differently. Not only does it imply living with fear, but it also goads the spirit of self-censorship that makes us ask: Is it worth it? Is exposing yet another atrocity in a country of despicable leaders really worth the risk? I can only answer that it is always worth telling the truth, always worth fighting against ignominy and trying to build a country in which it is worth growing up, living, loving.

    And then there is the ever-present guilt of us men and women who survive: we wear that guilt like a tattoo when the threats are shared, until one terrible night you learn of the openly forewarned death of that person you just spoke to on the phone; a person who had faith, who believed in ethics; a person with whom you repeated like a mantra: They won’t dare kill you: not after all the denunciations against him; not after you’ve openly pointed the finger at your potential murderer. They won’t dare kill you.

    I can hear Rubén’s voice, and the voices of many other colleagues singing along side by side at a solidarity march: ‘No se mata la verdad matando periodistas.’ / ‘You cannot kill the truth killing journalists.’

    You can read this piece in the original Spanish on Aristegui Noticias: http://aristeguinoticias.com/0308/mexico/no-se-mata-la-verdad-articulo-de-lydia-cacho/

    English PEN members have joined writers from around the world in condemning the murder of Rubén Espinosa. Read the letter here.

  • Ayotzinapa

    Ayotzinapa Rural Training College was set up in 1931 in the state of Guerrero, near the city of Iguala. It is one of several rural colleges in Mexico, whose primary objective was to promote social change, and whose classrooms have given rise to various social movements over the decades.

    Poverty is the most common condition. The support that Ayotzinapa Training College receives from the government amounts to nothing at all. Each student lives on 35 pesos a day (under $3), though they also help to cultivate crops and rear livestock on the former hacienda’s lands, to meet their basic daily food needs.

    Humble origins are always accompanied by generosity. Neighbours of Ayotzinapa frequently count on the students’ support, from help in the fields to rescue during hurricanes. What the students demand for themselves and their community are better living conditions, work opportunities, and that the College continues to exist, for they firmly believe that education is the most valuable route to achievement.

    They also denounce injustices that they have suffered at the hands of the state. For example, back in 2012, two students – Jorge Alexis Herrera Pino and Gabriel Echeverría de Jesús – died of gunshot wounds after being caught up in a joint police–army operation on the Autopista del Sol.

    The sense of outrage among the students today is stronger than ever, for 43 of their classmates are missing from their homes in Ayotzinapa. The current crisis started on 26 September 2014, when the College’s first-year students were mandated to attend an annual march in Mexico City to commemorate the Tlatelolco Massacre of 2 October 1968, in which hundreds of unarmed Mexicans, mostly student protesters, were gunned down by police and armed forces.

    Once the students had requisitioned the necessary number of buses they headed out to the highway to Chipalcingo, but three of the buses lost their way. Official reports, independent investigations and witnesses’ accounts are confused and contradictory, but there is no doubt at all that municipal police patrols blocked the path of the bus cavalcade and opened fire. Aldo Gutiérrez was shot in the head and died; he was the first victim. The surviving students confirm that it was the federal police who fired on and then detained them. They sought shelter, the wounded among them crying out for help, others using their mobile phones to call classmates at Ayotzinapa, calling for immediate assistance.

    A second round of firing damaged the buses which should have been on their way to Mexico City. Survivors report that it was again the federal police who fired on and then detained them. A few hours later fellow students arrived from Ayotzinapa and also fell victim. The police recovered the spent bullet casings, and arrested a number of young people at the scene.

    On the morning of 27 September there was little mention in the media of the attack mounted on the students, only of the unrest they had supposedly provoked. It was only later that it became known that 43 students had disappeared at the hands of the army and federal police. Among the various versions it was announced that the 43 had been handed over to a criminal gang of drug traffickers – the Guerreros Unidos. From that moment began the Calvary of their family members, who have still not been told of their precise fate.

    Just three months before the events at Ayotzinapa, we had learnt of the execution of 22 young people in a bar in the town of Tlatlaya. When the news was broadcast, it was presented in such a way as to look like a military victory over narco-traffickers and members of the Guerreros Unidos. In Esquire magazine Spanish journalist Pablo Ferri published the testimony of a witness to the massacre who related how members of the army had killed the young people. Later on it emerged that three soldiers had opened fire on the young people without the least justification; the three individuals are supposedly to be tried in court for their actions.

    Adolescent girls were left widowed mothers when their young husbands died in that Tlatlaya bar.

    In Mexico young people are annihilated as if they were a plague.

    Since 2005, 38 mass graves have been dug in Guerrero alone.

    In everyday speech, to disappear a citizen is commonly referred to as a levantón – slang for a raid or a snatch – a word without legal meaning and which cannot therefore lead to a prosecution. ‘Forced disappearance’ is not deemed a crime in some Mexican jurisdictions, even though it was defined as such in the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court in 1988.

    On 27 January 2015, the former Attorney General of the Republic of Mexico, Jesús Murillo Karam, announced that the students had died; their bodies had been incinerated at a rubbish tip in Cocula, Guerrero; and their ashes had been thrown in the river so as not to leave a trace. He confirmed that the assassins were members of the drug-trafficking gang Guerreros Unidos. Murillo Karam concluded: ‘This is the historical truth.’ Thus he intended to close ‘the Iguala case’ – but widespread indignation was not long in coming.

    Three levels of government – municipal, state and federal – have been ineffectual, ambiguous and evasive about the Ayotzinapa cases. The parents themselves have searched for traces of the 43 young people. They have been reinforced by volunteers, journalists and students of numerous other universities, not only in conducting searches but also with the mass demonstrations that have spread through all the main streets and avenues of the country. These spontaneous and passionate protests have been organised on social media and have proved to be a magnificent example of civic consciousness-raising. Across the world there have been demonstrations in 60 capitals demanding to know the whereabouts of the 43 students. Ayotzinapa has spread beyond Guerrero’s borders, and ceased to be the local matter the authorities wish it to be.

    Impotence, sadness, pain and rage unite Mexicans marching in the streets of Mexico City and along the main avenues of other Mexican towns, every one bearing the photograph of a college student before them like a shield.

    The mother of a student named Julio César Mondragón Fontes suffered such a deep depression that she lost her voice and could scarcely find the strength to declare: ‘To those who administer justice, poor people like us don’t count. Julio César and the other 43 students mean nothing to them, any more than all the families left here to suffer such a barbarity, one we have no means to rectify.’

    On Thursday 19 March this year, a group of experts from the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights asked the Mexican government that the Ayotzinapa case be considered as one of forced abduction. Any failure to proscribe it would then become a crime against humanity and the authorities would be obliged to continue the investigation until the whereabouts of the 43 students is uncovered.

    The tragedy of Ayotzinapa has highlighted the thousands of cases that have not been investigated. In his essay published in El País on 30 October 2014, Juan Villoro wrote: ‘Mexico is united in indignation and there is an angry clamour for things to change… the Mexico of the armed forces is afraid of those who teach literacy,’ because a literate country is one that can demand and denounce. A literate country can be disobedient. Real students on the marches do not make use of chains, sticks, stones or aggression in order to demand justice. Students act in solidarity, they demand and reclaim what is true, because they know their rights and their responsibilities. According to the Italian journalist Federico Mastrogiovanni, winner of the Mexican PEN Prize in 2015, the massacre in Tlatlaya and the disappearance of the 43 Ayotzinapa students were significant because society (in Mexico and elsewhere) has reacted, as opposed to previous cases when people kept quiet for fear of reprisals.

    Many citizens have come out and demonstrated their condemnation. Francisco Toledo, a famous Mexican painter and artist, let loose 43 paper kites bearing the images of the 43 disappeared students in the Zócalo, the main square in Oaxaca. At the Guadalajara Book Fair in December 2014, there was a count-up, repeated four or five times daily, from 1 to 43. A poem by David Huerta, from where the following lines are taken, was read out at every opportunity:

    This is the country of graves
    Ladies and gentlemen
    This the country of howls
    This the country of children in flames
    This the country of martyred women
    This the country that yesterday barely existed
    And today doesn’t know where it went.

    Find out more about Elena Poniatowska’s novel Leonora.

    On 19 May the Euro Caravana 43, representatives of the 43 Mexican students who were kidnapped in Iguala, Guerrero in September 2014, will be in London. View the full programme of events and activities here. If you would like to send a message of support, please do so via cat@englishpen.org.

    On Friday 29 May English PEN will host an event to celebrate the publication of Mexico 20 – an anthology of contemporary Mexican writing. Laia Jufresa, Brenda Lozano and Daniel Saldaña París will be in conversation with Maya Jaggi. For more information and to book, click here.

  • Self-censorship and silence

    Translated from the Spanish by Annie McDermott

    ‘I’m alive because I know who’s in charge. People follow the orders of the Gulf Cartel around here,’ says Francisco, a journalist from the city of Matamoros in Tamaulipas, which is considered to be one of Mexico’s ‘narco-states’.

    Francisco does not only receive instructions from his editor. He also takes calls from the ‘boss of the plaza’, who orders him to put in or take out images of shootings and dead bodies: ‘If you care about your family, keep that shooting yesterday out of the papers. Otherwise, you’re fucked.’ And Francisco obeys – to save his life, to keep his job.

    Francisco, like so many others, suffers from ‘self-censorship’. This is an increasingly common phenomenon in Mexico, the most dangerous country in Latin America for journalists, and one whose citizens’ right to information is being severely violated by attacks on the press: more than 120 journalists have been killed in recent years, and 22 have disappeared. In this country, journalists are murdered because of what they publish and because of what they refuse to publish. Every 26 hours, a journalist will be the victim of an act of violence. Last year alone, 326 attacks on communicators were recorded, five of which were murders. And it isn’t only organised crime that’s killing journalists. Most of the attackers are officials or agents of the Mexican state.

    The murders are getting bloodier and crueller, and they involve every kind of torture. The violence against female journalists is particularly terrible, and often gender-specific: the majority of those killed were also raped or mutilated, and some were even decapitated. We’re tired of watching the bodies of our colleagues and friends being taken away, and the pain and suffering their spilt blood leaves in its wake.

    The relentless assault on freedom of expression is getting worse. By choosing not to guarantee the safety of journalists, Enrique Peña Nieto’s government has succeeded in silencing important independent critical voices. Bullets, censorship, self-censorship and government control of advertising and TV and radio concessions have led to a serious lack of correct and timely information, and a dearth of news about key issues such as state crimes committed by the army, the navy and the various police forces. There is not enough coverage of the phenomenon of narcopolitics, the collusion of corrupt authorities with the powerful drug cartels that dominate the Mexican territory, or the smuggling and piracy that have, with the cooperation of the police, passed into the hands of organised crime. State violence – forced disappearances, extrajudicial killings and torture – hardly receives any attention in the televised media. There are parts of the press under the thumb of the government or the drug cartels. There are forbidden topics and forbidden journalists. The idea is to instil fear, horror and silence.

    Those of us who dare to break the barrier of silence have to confront all kinds of threats. We work in conditions of war, but without the protection that reporters covering armed conflicts would normally receive. Here there are no bullet-proof vests or helmets. Press signs on vehicles mean nothing, and neither do the press cards that are supposed to ensure your personal safety in neutral territory.

    Faced with the drug barons’ Kalashnikovs, we have only our pens. Among the mighty rifles of the army or the police, there are only our notebooks and computers. We are an easy target. It doesn’t cost much to kill journalists in Mexico, and the murderers know that it’s highly unlikely anything will happen to them afterwards. Impunity is the only constant. Over 90% of murders go unpunished, despite the existence of the Office of the Special Prosecutor for Attention to Crimes Against Freedom of Expression, which last year recorded a backlog of 120 pending cases. The Public Prosecutor’s Office is a smokescreen. The Mexican state would rather carry on pretending than actually take action to protect the country’s journalists.

    This is an unequal war. As journalists, we have words. The people attacking us have bullets. Mexican journalism is wounded; information is mutilated.

    Why do we stay here, why do we carry on? Out of dignity and a commitment to the truth. Our mission is to search for that truth in spite of everything. Mexican journalists have learnt to work under hostile conditions, completely undefended. We live with persecution and harassment. But we don’t let fear paralyse us – on the contrary, it helps us to measure the risks and stay alive, to continue giving a voice to the voiceless and shining a light on dark secrets that are normally kept silent.

    Staying here and carrying on, that’s the mission, although we can smell the predator’s rotten breath, although we can hear the bullets, although we know that words cost lives. Freedom has a high price in Mexico, but it’s the only way we have of reaching the truth.

    Read this piece in the original Spanish here.

    Read ARTICLE 19 Mexico’s annual report ‘State of Censorship’, which examines freedom of expression in Mexico.

    Sanjuana Martínez is a featured writer in English PEN’s 2015 Mexico focus. Read about her case and take action here.

    To find out more about Sanjuana Martinez and her work, visit www.websanjuanamartinez.com.mx
    Follow her on Twitter: @SanjuanaMtz
    Visit her Facebook page: Sanjuana Martinez

  • Autocensura y silencio

    Read Annie McDermott’s English translation of this piece here.

    ‘Estoy vivo porque se quien manda. Aquí se hace lo que ordena el Cártel del Golfo,’ dice Francisco, un periodista de la ciudad de Matamoros, Tamaulipas, considerado un narcoestado de México.

    Las órdenes de trabajo para Francisco no vienen solamente del jefe de redacción, también atiende las llamadas del ‘jefe de la plaza’ quien le ordena quitar o poner imágenes de balaceras o cadáveres: ‘Si quieres cuidar a tu familia, no publiques nada de la balacera de ayer, si no, te va a llevar la chingada,’ le dice quien se ostenta solo como ‘jefe de plaza’. Y Francisco obedece para salvar la vida, para conservar su trabajo.

    Francisco como muchos, padece la ‘autocensura’, un fenómeno cada vez más común en México, el país más peligroso en América Latina, para ejercer el periodismo y donde el derecho a la información de los ciudadanos está siendo vulnerado severamente por la violencia contra la prensa: más de 120 periodistas han muerto en los últimos años y 22 permanecen desaparecidos. En este país, los periodistas son asesinados por lo que publican o por lo que se niegan a publicar. Cada 26 horas, un periodista será víctima de un hecho violento. Tan solo el año pasado, se registraron 326 ataques contra comunicadores y cinco fueron asesinados. A los periodistas no los asesina solamente el crimen organizado. La mayor parte de los agresores son funcionarios o agentes del estado mexicano.

    Los asesinatos son cada vez más sanguinarios y más crueles. Incluyen torturas de todo tipo. La violencia contra las periodistas es terrible, el componente de género está incluido, la mayoría de las ejecutadas fueron violadas, o mutiladas; algunas incluso decapitadas. Estamos cansados de ver pasar los cadáveres de nuestros colegas, de nuestros amigos. La estela de dolor y sufrimiento que va dejando la sangre derramada de nuestros compañeros.

    La guerra sin cuartel contra la libertad de expresión se intensifica. El gobierno de Enrique Peña Nieto prefiere no garantizar la seguridad de los periodistas y de esta manera, ha conseguido acallar importantes voces independientes y críticas. Las balas, la censura, la autocensura o el control gubernamental sobre publicidad y concesiones de radio y televisión, han ido provocando un alto déficit de información veraz y oportuna, una ausencia de noticias y cobertura informativa sobre temas importantes como los crímenes de Estado cometidos por el Ejército, la Marina o las distintas policías. Tampoco hay suficientes noticias sobre el fenómeno de la narcopolítica, la connivencia de autoridades corruptas con los poderosos cárteles de la droga que dominan el territorio mexicano o el contrabando y la piratería que ha pasado a manos del crimen organizado en connivencia con los policías. Las desapariciones forzadas, ejecuciones extrajudiciales; la tortura, son parte de la violencia del Estado que difícilmente encuentra un espacio digno en los medios de comunicación televisivos. Una parte de la prensa está arrodillada ante el poder gubernamental o el poder del narcotráfico. Hay temas prohibidos y periodistas prohibidos. Se trata de instaurar el miedo, el terror y el silencio.

    Quienes nos atrevemos a romper el cerco de silencio, tenemos que enfrentarnos a todo tipo de amenazas. Trabajamos en condiciones de guerra, pero sin la protección que debe ser brindada a los informadores en  la típica cobertura de conflictos bélicos. Aquí no hay chaleco antibalas ni cascos. Tampoco funciona el aviso el aviso de ‘prensa’ colocado en los vehículos, o la acreditación que salvaguarda tu integridad física en territorio neutral.

    Frente a los Kalashnikov de los capos de la droga solo tenemos nuestras plumas. Entre los rifles de alto poder del Ejército o las policías, solo están nuestras libretas y computadoras. Somos un blanco fácil. Matar periodistas en México sale barato. Los asesinos saben que hay una gran probabilidad de que no les pase nada. La impunidad es la constante. Más del 90 por ciento de los asesinatos sigue impune a pesar de que existe la Fiscalía Especial para la Atención de Delitos cometidos contra la Libertad de Expresión, la cual, el año pasado, registró un rezago 120 casos. La fiscalía es una cortina de humo. El estado mexicano prefiere simular que actuar y proteger a los periodistas.

    Esta es una guerra desigual. Los periodistas tenemos la palabra. Ellos – los depredadores de la prensa – tienen las balas. El periodismo mexicano está herido. La información mutilada.

    ¿Por qué seguimos aquí? Por dignidad, por compromiso con la verdad. Nuestra misión es la búsqueda de esa verdad por encima de cualquier obstáculo. Los periodistas mexicanos hemos aprendido a trabajar en condiciones adversas de absoluta indefensión. Convivimos con la persecución, el hostigamiento y el acoso. Pero el miedo no nos paraliza, al contrario, nos ayuda a medir los riesgos para seguir con vida, para continuar dando voz a los sin voz y lanzar luz sobre las zonas oscuras de la información sometidas al silencio.

    Seguir aquí, es la misión, aunque el fétido aliento del depredador este cerca, aunque se escuche el sonido de las balas y las palabras cuesten la vida. La libertad, tiene un alto precio en México, pero es el único camino para llegar a la verdad.

    Read Annie McDermott’s English translation of this piece here.

    Read ARTICLE 19 Mexico’s annual report ‘Estado de Censura’, which examines freedom of expression in Mexico.

    Sanjuana Martínez is a featured writer in English PEN’s 2015 Mexico focus. Read about her case and take action here.

    To find out more about Sanjuana Martinez and her work, visit www.websanjuanamartinez.com.mx
    Follow her on Twitter: @SanjuanaMtz
    Visit her Facebook page: Sanjuana Martinez

  • The long road home

    The news was splashed all over the front pages of the international, and in particular, the North American press halfway through 2014: a wave of undocumented minors from Central America was being arrested after crossing the Mexican border into the United States. When they actually managed to do so, that is: in other words, when the violence of criminal gangs or police forces didn’t catch up with them at some wretched point along their journey. It was not, of course, a new phenomenon, but what was new was the scale, which brought it close to a humanitarian crisis.

    I was following it all from a distance (I was living in Brazil at the time), via Mexican radio, especially thanks to the excellent coverage provided by Carmen Aristegui and her correspondent in the States, Dolia Estévez – both of whom, incidentally, ended up being fired by the station, yet another illustration of the climate of censorship in Mexico at the moment (but that’s a topic for another article).

    Thinking about these kids, looking at the few photos of them slowly filtering through into the media, touched a very deep nerve in me: it made me compare their fate with my own kids’, also immigrants in their own way albeit, luckily for them, ‘luxury immigrants’. Making such a comparison might seem frivolous, crass, even, but I’d like to defend myself and say that every child should have the same opportunities and enjoy the same rights; nevertheless, this is not how things are (they are very far from being this way) and there is, in fact, a chasm between the realities of these young immigrants and of my children.

    Around then, a few timely coincidences came together when Michael Benoist, editor of Medium’s Matter magazine, suggested I travel to Los Angeles to interview a few of these kids and tell their stories. Mike had read my novel Down the Rabbit Hole, in which the narrator is a boy trapped in the violence of the drugs trade, and he wanted me to tell the story of these boys in their own voices, from their perspective, ‘erasing myself’ as a writer.

    I went to Los Angeles, and with the invaluable help of the NGO Carecen (especially Tessie Borden) I met Alex and Cristhian, who told me of the odyssey that took them from Guatemala and Honduras to the United States, where they were arrested by the immigration police. Alex had run away from an alcoholic father and a life with no hope in a poor village in Guatemala. Cristhian was fleeing the gangs of San Pedro Sula, one of the most violent cities in the world. I met them in the homes of the families who had taken them in. Despite their messy legal situation, they were calm and content; they seemed to think that the worst was behind them.

    On their journey, accompanied by a coyote – as the person who smuggles people across the Mexican border is known – they had to deal with (among other things) regular harassment from corrupt Mexican police, who did nothing but extort them repeatedly in return for allowing them to continue their travels.

    Incredibly, neither Alex nor Cristhian feel at all bitter towards Mexico, and nor do they speak or act like victims, perhaps because their story was on track to have a happy ending, and managing to escape violence and most probably an early death has given them a perspective that we, from our safe, secure positions, do not have: a perspective that plays down the negative and in which the hope of a new life seems to justify any suffering.

    ‘I’d be dead by now,’ Cristhian said to me on more than one occasion as he recalled that, shortly after he left, two of his best friends were murdered on the football pitch where they used to play together. He said it with the sadness of someone who’s lost a friend and with the relief we all feel when we think, ‘It wasn’t me, I escaped.’

    Something very serious happens when the fate of a great number of children and young people in Latin America is divided between ‘the ones who managed to escape’ and ‘the ones who didn’t live to tell the tale’, when their only options are ‘flee or die’. We are doing something very wrong when we deny the most basic of rights to entire generations, whether it’s in their home country or the one they emigrate to: the right to a decent life.

    Read Alex and Cristhian’s stories on Medium, in Spanish or English.

    Buy Juan Pablo Villalobos’s books from Foyles.

  • Cherishing Mexico's oral culture

    In the latest of our PEN Atlas Mexican series, Pergentino José Ruiz stands up for his country’s indigenous languages, which ‘create a dialogue between Mexico’s oral and written traditions’.

    Translated from the Spanish by Annie McDermott

    Oral culture in Mexico connects the nation of today with its Mesoamerican past; it also represents the collective memory that has for centuries been contained in the spoken word. ‘In the prehispanic world, the cosmovision, the religious doctrines and the science of the ritual calendar were preserved and transmitted in two principal ways invented by the cultures of ancient Mexico: the oral tradition, and the glyphs or carvings of symbols in codices and stelae,’ says Nahuatl culture specialist Miguel León Portilla in his book Thirteen Poets of the Aztec World. Since the ancient palaces, ceremonial centres, stelae and hundreds of codices were destroyed by the Spanish conquistadores when they arrived on Mexican soil, some of our only remaining links with Mesoamerican culture are the oral traditions of the sixty-four indigenous languages still spoken in Mexico today.

    The cultures of Mesoamerica were no strangers to literature, as Ángel María Garibay shows in his History of Nahuatl Literature. Indeed, Garibay argues for the existence of an autonomous poetic tradition between the years of 1430 and 1521, when the Aztecs dominated much of Mexico. He bases this claim on the ethnographic work of the Franciscan friars Bernadino de Sahagún and Andrés de Olmos, whose records of Aztec culture include sacred poems, brief narratives and prayers to the gods.

    And yet ever since its first years as an independent republic, Mexico has followed a tradition that dates back to the colonial era: that of seeing indigenous culture as a barrier to progress. The state has put in place very few initiatives to preserve the languages of its original inhabitants, and indeed its stance on the issue has often been sharply contradictory. For example, in the 1920s, when the fighting of the Mexican revolution was drawing to a close, the country was at once celebrating its indigenous past and introducing education policies that required indigenous populations to speak Spanish in the name of national unity.

    The country then saw the beginnings of the indigenismo movement in the 1930s, when land was shared out among the peasants under the government of Lázaro Cárdenas and linguists and anthropologists started taking a greater interest in indigenous life and culture. The movement was fundamental to maintaining the public’s focus on indigenous issues, and novelists soon aligned themselves with the cause: Rosario Castellanos, José Revueltas, Agustín Yañez, José Arreola, and of course the great Juan Rulfo with Pedro Páramo. Although Rulfo’s novel touches only briefly on the hardships faced by indigenous people, it does so with a literary brilliance that perfectly captures the mood of Mexican intellectual life in the 1950s.

    Nowadays, the situation of speakers in indigenous languages varies enormously depending on the region of the country. Some languages, including Nahuatl, Maya, Mixtec and Zapotec, are spoken by more than half a million people each, according to the National Institute of Indigenous Languages. For others, however, the situation is critical: Ixcatec, Kiliwa, Ixil, Papai and Cucapa, for example, have fewer than five hundred speakers each. If people from these latter cultures can be encouraged to write, it will reveal a legacy of legends, mythologies and beliefs that have been present in their speech for centuries; it will make way for other values, other conceptions of existence, in a Mexico that tends more and more towards cultural homogeneity. It will formalise and preserve their writing systems, vocabularies and grammars, and it will shine a light on the country’s cultural diversity and Mesoamerican heritage that has held on for centuries and refuses to disappear.

    In my case, I speak and write fiction in Zapotec, and to give you an idea of how that language is structured I will use the example of the many metaphors in our everyday speech that are based on the word heart. There is the greeting ‘Nza nzo laxoa?‘ (‘How is your heart?’, which corresponds to ‘How are you?’). There are ways of describing moods: ‘nabil nzo laxond‘ (‘my heart is sad’), and ‘nalee nzo laxond‘ (‘my heart is happy’). There are also expressions that go deeper, such as ‘Na kap nak la, na nzod rend laxoa‘ (‘You feel nothing, there is no blood in your heart’). If we write literature in indigenous languages, we create a dialogue between Mexico’s oral and written traditions. We infuse our written culture with the collective memory and magical thinking that are still scattered throughout people’s speech in this country, and, in doing so, we keep our Mesoamerican heritage alive.