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Tag: Mexico

  • 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.

  • And when the Mexican comic emerged from the sea…

    In the latest of our PEN Atlas Mexican series, novelist Laia Jufresa muses on the fall and rise of Mexican comics

    Translated from the Spanish by Annie McDermott

    I remember my first lesson in narrative art: the day I learnt – or experienced – what a deus ex machina is, and why it’s not a good idea to spring one on your reader. I was at a family gathering and my aunts and uncles were reminiscing about their childhood, one populated by characters from the comic books they bought religiously every Friday: Kalimán, Los supersabios and La familia Burrón, all of them made in Mexico. One Friday, Kalimán (which was printed in sepia) ended with the hero chained to a rock, plummeting to the depths of the sea. My aunts and uncles spent hours – days – constructing elaborate theories about how he would make it out of the water. (Would he break the chains? Would he be saved by his sidekick Solín?) But when they finally got their hands on the next issue, it began like this: ‘And when Kalimán had emerged from the sea…’ The treachery! Unforgivable for the average child in the fifties, who consumed Mexican comics with the same feverish devotion with which children today demand iPhones. Even now, people born in the fifties make jokes based on those comics. In the company of my aunts and uncles, for example, you can’t show any kind of bodily disgust without them comparing you to Borola Burrón, who was horrified when she learnt she had a skeleton inside her.

    Because of all this you might think that I too was raised on a healthy diet of local comics, but I wasn’t. By the time I started to read, at the end of the eighties, the national comic book industry (which had at one point been the most productive in the world: every week, two million copies were printed of Kalimán alone) was in decline. The main publishers had decided to focus on translating material from elsewhere (much cheaper than producing their own) and the stands were filling up with imported superheroes. The country’s comic book tradition was sinking fast, chained to a rock. My generation read foreign comics. Bernardo Fernández, ‘Bef’, perhaps the main representative (and defender) of graphic novels in Mexico, learnt English by reading comics and has said he feels ‘no creative or emotional connection to the old Mexican comic strips’.

    But now the Mexican comic book is emerging from the sea, transformed into webcomics or graphic novels. Over the past four years, government-funded scholarships, national prizes, dedicated festivals and a few more publishers (Resistencia, Sexto Piso, Caligrama, Jus – still not many) are getting behind the genre. This is a new creature, more sophisticated and, inevitably, less popular. However, this creature has not simply materialised from the ether – it has materialised from the persistent efforts of its creators – and neither is it the daughter of the twentieth-century Mexican comic book alone. If anything, it is its long-lost niece, an animal with mixed blood in its veins: from manga, from pop, from French bandes desinées, and from everything else the random tides of the internet can cast ashore. And this great variety of influences leads to a great variety of voices and styles, from Edgar Clement’s complex clarity to the muted palette and painterly flourishes of Patricio Betteo, via the playful, digital figures drawn by Micro and the straightforward yet subtle watercolours of Alejandra Espino.

    It is interesting to see that Mexican history is still the most important character in the country’s comics, however far-reaching their other influences may be. This was the case in F.G. Haghenbeck’s anthology, A Mexican in Each of Your Comic Books [Un mexicano en cada comic te dio] (paraphrasing a line from the national anthem: ‘a soldier in each of your sons’), as it is in the forthcoming Moquito and the Colonial Sarcophagus [Moquito y la Momia Colonial] by Juanele (set in the colonial period) and Rafaela by Alejandra Espino (about ‘a woman in the twenties in an alternative Mexico City, an aspiring muralist who wants to paint fantastical rather than historical scenes’). In Cry of Victory [Grito de victoria], Augusto Mora explores two recent civil protest movements: the marches in 1971 and the #YoSoy132 protests. There is also Operation Bolívar [Operación Bolívar] and others by Edgar Clement, which are rooted in fiction and mythology but have clear parallels with the country’s painful contemporary reality. In a sense, the history of Mexico also stars in Uncle Bill, the new graphic novel by Bef, a virtuoso account of William Burroughs’ fateful years in the country.

    It isn’t all Mexican history, of course. The brilliant Powernap happens in the future in a place that could be anywhere in the world. Its author, Maritza Campos, began writing it in Spanish, but – like Bef, and like so many others – she has become bilingual and almost bi-national as a result of consuming and assimilating so much American culture, and she soon switched into English. Powernap takes place in a world in which people no longer sleep; it’s illustrated by Sebastián ‘Bachan’ Carrillo and you can read it online or buy it in an elegant edition that was financed by crowdfunding.

    In a country that tends – by necessity, by instinct, by way of a response to its barbaric reality – towards graphic violence, I think it’s worth celebrating the people who are producing graphic novels instead. People working hard at telling good stories. Because this – telling stories – is, I think, also a social responsibility. Storytelling with images has historically had a wider audience because of its ability to reach people who couldn’t read. This isn’t necessarily the case with contemporary graphic fiction, and yet I see in this new creature of ours a determination to go far. And I hope it does. It really deserves to.

    Find out more about Laia Jufresa at www.laiajufresa.com.

    Read English PEN’s open letter to President Enrique Peña Nieto on the occasion of his visit to the UK as part of #mxuk2015.

  • The optimist’s words

    Transformations require a big effort, even when the leaders of a country understand what’s at stake in a crisis and what needs to be done. But when the leaders of a country are entrenched and protective of their privileges, then transformation is not something that can be entrusted to them. That is exactly the situation in Mexico right now, where our economic and political elites don’t seem to understand what they have to do, or even what they have to say, in order to solve the two most urgent problems in the country: all-pervading impunity and rampant corruption.

    When President Enrique Peña Nieto visited the state of Guerrero for the first time after the kidnapping of forty-three students on 26th September 2014 by organized crime and the local police, he asked the public to make an effort to get over the ‘moment of pain’ and to rebuild the state with a ‘propositive and constructive attitude’.

    That was on December the 4th, less than two and a half months after the events. None of the students had been found by then. A few weeks before, the Attorney General had presented a hypothesis of what had happened: following orders by the mayor of Iguala, he said, the local police had kidnapped the students and delivered them to a group of narcos, who then murdered them, incinerated them and threw their remains into a river. But he had presented no hard evidence to support his theory. Still, the President decided it was time to get over the episode, a mere ‘moment of pain’.

    Moreover, the next time he referred to the case, on January 27th, still with no mention of where the students could be, he said that we must not ‘get trapped’ in the case, and asked the nation to move forward with optimism. Solving a case so horrendous and so symptomatic of the entanglement of politics and criminal business was apparently not urgent any more; it was a sort of ‘trap’.

    Following this logic, a few weeks ago a prominent businessman, Lorenzo Servitje, co-founder of one of the biggest junk food companies in Mexico, expressed his concerns about the social unrest, stating that some (unnamed) groups were taking advantage of a situation that had been blown out of proportion (‘se le ha dado una dimension que no tiene’). In this, he aligned himself with the leadership of the business council who, after initially demanding a thorough investigation, eventually pressured the government to put a stop to the growing protests around the country, to make them respect the law.

    But none of these people said a thing when it was revealed that many of their colleagues had been part of a laundering scheme by HSBC that included politicians, criminals and entrepreneurs from all over the world. Neither did they ask for ‘mano dura’ when the same bank was fined in 2012 for laundering billions of dollars for terrorists and drug cartels. So much for going after the ‘vandals’.

    All this has been happening in the context of another story that puts into question how our elites understand the rule of law. In the last few months there have been revelations that the President and several other high-ranking government officials have acquired properties with the help of huge government contractors. After weeks of simply assuring everyone there was no wrongdoing, the President appointed a Minister of Public Service whose first task was to look into the cases and determine if there had been any conflict of interest. The problem is that the person he appointed is not an independent investigator but a bureaucrat on Peña Nieto’s payroll, who also happens to be a close friend. Upon finishing the press conference in which he announced this, the President looked a bit embarrassed by the silence that hung in the room. Pointing at the press corps, he said to one of his aides, ‘I know they don’t applaud.’

    It’s easy to mock a politician for a lack of cheering, or his mispronunciation of the place where the kidnapped students come from (he repeatedly referred to ‘Ayotzinapan’ instead of ‘Ayotzinapa’, as if he didn’t know what he was talking about). Scorn towards the powerful is healthy, but sometimes it doesn’t allow us to see what’s behind their ‘slips’ and ‘fumbles’. People used to make jokes about how the former President Calderón said that he never pronounced the word ‘war’ to define his irresponsible strategy towards organized crime, even though he did precisely that on at least eight occasions. But when a man in charge of an army declares war and then forgets about it, it’s more than a funny story about his forgetfulness.

    The words of a president are more than his personal quirks; they are the explanation of his policies, no matter how clumsy those words may be. So, when our current president, Enrique Peña Nieto, says that a tragedy as horrendous as the one that took place in Ayotzinapa is just a ‘moment of pain’, and when he expects to be applauded for pretending that he is doing something against corruption, it is not surprising that he and his billionaire allies see the protesters —and not the people who have been financing mass murderers for years now— as the biggest danger to our stability. Mexicans cannot feel frustrated with their ‘leaders’, because they have been very clear about their priorities. But we have to be clear that, when they talk about reforms, they are just talking about minor adjustments to business as usual.

    Signs Preceding the End of the World is available to buy from Foyles book shop.

    Read English PEN’s open letter to President Nieto on the occasion of his visit to the UK.

  • The optimist's words

    Transformations require a big effort, even when the leaders of a country understand what’s at stake in a crisis and what needs to be done. But when the leaders of a country are entrenched and protective of their privileges, then transformation is not something that can be entrusted to them. That is exactly the situation in Mexico right now, where our economic and political elites don’t seem to understand what they have to do, or even what they have to say, in order to solve the two most urgent problems in the country: all-pervading impunity and rampant corruption.

    When President Enrique Peña Nieto visited the state of Guerrero for the first time after the kidnapping of forty-three students on 26th September 2014 by organized crime and the local police, he asked the public to make an effort to get over the ‘moment of pain’ and to rebuild the state with a ‘propositive and constructive attitude’.

    That was on December the 4th, less than two and a half months after the events. None of the students had been found by then. A few weeks before, the Attorney General had presented a hypothesis of what had happened: following orders by the mayor of Iguala, he said, the local police had kidnapped the students and delivered them to a group of narcos, who then murdered them, incinerated them and threw their remains into a river. But he had presented no hard evidence to support his theory. Still, the President decided it was time to get over the episode, a mere ‘moment of pain’.

    Moreover, the next time he referred to the case, on January 27th, still with no mention of where the students could be, he said that we must not ‘get trapped’ in the case, and asked the nation to move forward with optimism. Solving a case so horrendous and so symptomatic of the entanglement of politics and criminal business was apparently not urgent any more; it was a sort of ‘trap’.

    Following this logic, a few weeks ago a prominent businessman, Lorenzo Servitje, co-founder of one of the biggest junk food companies in Mexico, expressed his concerns about the social unrest, stating that some (unnamed) groups were taking advantage of a situation that had been blown out of proportion (‘se le ha dado una dimension que no tiene’). In this, he aligned himself with the leadership of the business council who, after initially demanding a thorough investigation, eventually pressured the government to put a stop to the growing protests around the country, to make them respect the law.

    But none of these people said a thing when it was revealed that many of their colleagues had been part of a laundering scheme by HSBC that included politicians, criminals and entrepreneurs from all over the world. Neither did they ask for ‘mano dura’ when the same bank was fined in 2012 for laundering billions of dollars for terrorists and drug cartels. So much for going after the ‘vandals’.

    All this has been happening in the context of another story that puts into question how our elites understand the rule of law. In the last few months there have been revelations that the President and several other high-ranking government officials have acquired properties with the help of huge government contractors. After weeks of simply assuring everyone there was no wrongdoing, the President appointed a Minister of Public Service whose first task was to look into the cases and determine if there had been any conflict of interest. The problem is that the person he appointed is not an independent investigator but a bureaucrat on Peña Nieto’s payroll, who also happens to be a close friend. Upon finishing the press conference in which he announced this, the President looked a bit embarrassed by the silence that hung in the room. Pointing at the press corps, he said to one of his aides, ‘I know they don’t applaud.’

    It’s easy to mock a politician for a lack of cheering, or his mispronunciation of the place where the kidnapped students come from (he repeatedly referred to ‘Ayotzinapan’ instead of ‘Ayotzinapa’, as if he didn’t know what he was talking about). Scorn towards the powerful is healthy, but sometimes it doesn’t allow us to see what’s behind their ‘slips’ and ‘fumbles’. People used to make jokes about how the former President Calderón said that he never pronounced the word ‘war’ to define his irresponsible strategy towards organized crime, even though he did precisely that on at least eight occasions. But when a man in charge of an army declares war and then forgets about it, it’s more than a funny story about his forgetfulness.

    The words of a president are more than his personal quirks; they are the explanation of his policies, no matter how clumsy those words may be. So, when our current president, Enrique Peña Nieto, says that a tragedy as horrendous as the one that took place in Ayotzinapa is just a ‘moment of pain’, and when he expects to be applauded for pretending that he is doing something against corruption, it is not surprising that he and his billionaire allies see the protesters —and not the people who have been financing mass murderers for years now— as the biggest danger to our stability. Mexicans cannot feel frustrated with their ‘leaders’, because they have been very clear about their priorities. But we have to be clear that, when they talk about reforms, they are just talking about minor adjustments to business as usual.

    Signs Preceding the End of the World is available to buy from Foyles book shop.

    Read English PEN’s open letter to President Nieto on the occasion of his visit to the UK.

  • ‘They were taken alive, alive we want them returned!’

    Writers and PEN members all over the world have been supporting the struggle of the parents of the disappeared Mexican students to discover the truth about their children. On 30 
    November, on my way to the Feria Internacional del Libro [FIL], I attended a press conference in Mexico City.  Speakers included relatives of the 6 students shot and 43 abducted at gunpoint on 26 September by the local police and handed over to Guerreros Unidos ‘Warriors United’ – a major narco-trafficking gang.  The outcry over the students’ subsequent disappearance was exacerbated by reports of a smouldering fire laced with tyres, presumably to disguise the smell of burning flesh and obstruct future analysis.

    The students came from Guerrero, one of the poorest states in Mexico. Enrolled in a teachers’ training college, some were so impecunious that they arrived barefoot and with only a sheet of cardboard to sleep on. One, Jhosivani Guerrero de la Cruz, was described by his father as ‘slim, willowy, with slanted eyes that gave him the nickname “Coreano”, he has to walk 4km to the highway to catch the bus, then 4 km back to train as a teacher in his village of Omeapa.’ They were almost all from indigenous farming families; several wanted to teach in their own languages.

    One week later came the news no-one wanted to hear. General mistrust of the notoriously foot-dragging national forensics division had led to assistance from the respected Argentine Forensic Anthropological  Team and the University of Innsbruck, which analysed ash from the smouldering pyre. On 6 December they provided DNA identification of several students and released the name of the first: Alexander Mora Venancia, 19, from the village of El Pericón [‘The Big Parrakeet’].  At the press conference Mora’s father stated: ‘Nobody could dissuade him from wanting to be a teacher. He just loves teaching. At first he helped in the fields, but he always had the desire to study and to pass on what he learnt. I demand that the authorities do their job properly, and don’t simply cover up for those responsible for the massacre committed by the mayor of Iguala. Those young men were taken alive, alive I want them returned to us’.

    A vain hope against hope, but also a challenge to an indifferent government to account for itself. In this the families are supported, not only by regular mass demonstrations by hundreds of thousands of citizens, but by the international community.

    The former mayor of Guerrero Angel Aguirre’s brother-in-law is leader of the Guerreros Unidos narco-trafficking gang, to whom the abducted students were delivered. Aguirre and his wife fled to Mexico City, where they were found – but not arrested or questioned. Small wonder: the citizens of Guerrero have little faith either in Aguirre’s replacement or in the federal police force. ‘They threw out the local thugs and imposed others from Mexico. They have substituted the bad with the worse,’ says journalist Magali Tercero.

    Meanwhile President Peña Nieto has scandals of his own to preoccupy him: his wife Angelica is implicated in the purchase of a $11m second home, claiming it was bought with severance money from a TV soap. Allegations of corruption extend to her co-purchaser, awarded not only numerous governmental property development contracts but also the sole  concession to supply a new cross-country bullet train, with major Chinese investment.

    Mexico also has other currency earners to consider. Reports of mass graves, reeking with the smell of burning flesh, and of police and military answering to criminal gangs are not good for a tourism industry. The sense that in Mexico today – including in the beach resort of Acapulco, which is in Guerrero – one might be stepping on an undisclosed graveyard is hardly a tourist attraction. The flights I took to and from Mexico City were two-thirds empty. And agricultural production in the land that boasts 56 varieties of corn and chillies has here given way to poppies, making Mexico the world’s largest heroin producer after Afghanistan.

    No surprise that at the December Feria Internacional del Libro – the largest Hispanic book fair in the world and the biggest in its 18-year history – the 43 were everywhere with us.

    One of the few living authors from the 1960s boom, Elena Poniatowska, famous for writing Tlatelolco on the student massacre of 1968, repeated her commemoration of that event by explicitly linking it to the present, bringing each disappeared student to life with the name, age and a description of the character of each. She also deplored the fact that President Peňa Nieto had dared to appropriate the chant of Yo soy Ayotzinapa (I am Ayotzinapa) after doing nothing to bring the guilty to justice. Everyone in the crammed hall sang it then at full volume.

    Authors of the standing of Juan Villoro, Jorge Volpi and Ana Garc’ia Berguera opened their sessions with a countdown of the 43 students. ‘As writers we are all deeply wounded by what took place at Ayotzinapa,’ said Ana García Berguera and read from David Huerta’s epic poem, Ayotzinapa – circulated throughout the FIL, according to PEN, in many languages – including the line ‘our hearts are ousted from their place at our centre’ and the lines:

    Whoever reads this must also know

    That despite everything

    The dead have not departed

    Nor have they disappeared.

    Panels with speakers such as Darío Ramírez, of Article 19, and journalists Lydia Cacho and Carmen Aristegui were overflowed into video-linked public spaces. International authors including Claudio Magris (Italy); Bernardo Atxaga (Basque Country); Gioconda Belli (Nicaragua) and Andrés Neuman (Argentina) spoke out there and are, we assume, speaking out in their home countries too.

    At every event, students emblazoned with the number 43 spoke out in solidarity, and badges of support were distributed. Flash mobs appeared of young people fleeing through the crowded halls before suddenly ‘dropping down dead’ on the floor while the chant went up counting down from 43. The organisers boldly encouraged ongoing discussion, and the local media – which includes local Mexican PEN members and activists – provided wide coverage.

    In Mexico, PEN made clear the common cause between students, teachers, writers and readers – every one of us. Mexican PEN director – and author – Aline Davidoff highlighted the fact that of all the writers who speak out, journalists are bound to be first in the firing line. That is, unless they bow to intimidation and self-censorship. She commented that: ‘Here in Mexico we have a state of impunity where government and organised crime meet.’

    Of course, writers and journalists overlap, and here is what Juan Villoro, both writer and journalist, published in the Spanish daily El País on 30th October 2014, five weeks after the students’ abduction: ’43 future teachers have disappeared. The size of this tragedy comes down to a single phrase, one that opposes impunity, disgrace and injustice. The Mexico of guns and arms is afraid of those who teach others how to read.’

    The students’ families want nothing more than the return of their loved ones. Alive and – at worst, or – with a full account of what has happened to them. They also believe that only international pressure, particularly with the support of organisations such as PEN, can force the government to properly investigate their disappearance. In the words of Raúl Isidro Burgos: ‘We beg for international support so that this crisis does not remain ours alone. What we now suffer on a daily basis has to become the responsibility of the government, which to date has taken no responsibility at all.’

    (Image Brett Gundlock / Getty Images)

  • 'They were taken alive, alive we want them returned!'

    Writers and PEN members all over the world have been supporting the struggle of the parents of the disappeared Mexican students to discover the truth about their children. On 30 
    November, on my way to the Feria Internacional del Libro [FIL], I attended a press conference in Mexico City.  Speakers included relatives of the 6 students shot and 43 abducted at gunpoint on 26 September by the local police and handed over to Guerreros Unidos ‘Warriors United’ – a major narco-trafficking gang.  The outcry over the students’ subsequent disappearance was exacerbated by reports of a smouldering fire laced with tyres, presumably to disguise the smell of burning flesh and obstruct future analysis.

    The students came from Guerrero, one of the poorest states in Mexico. Enrolled in a teachers’ training college, some were so impecunious that they arrived barefoot and with only a sheet of cardboard to sleep on. One, Jhosivani Guerrero de la Cruz, was described by his father as ‘slim, willowy, with slanted eyes that gave him the nickname “Coreano”, he has to walk 4km to the highway to catch the bus, then 4 km back to train as a teacher in his village of Omeapa.’ They were almost all from indigenous farming families; several wanted to teach in their own languages.

    One week later came the news no-one wanted to hear. General mistrust of the notoriously foot-dragging national forensics division had led to assistance from the respected Argentine Forensic Anthropological  Team and the University of Innsbruck, which analysed ash from the smouldering pyre. On 6 December they provided DNA identification of several students and released the name of the first: Alexander Mora Venancia, 19, from the village of El Pericón [‘The Big Parrakeet’].  At the press conference Mora’s father stated: ‘Nobody could dissuade him from wanting to be a teacher. He just loves teaching. At first he helped in the fields, but he always had the desire to study and to pass on what he learnt. I demand that the authorities do their job properly, and don’t simply cover up for those responsible for the massacre committed by the mayor of Iguala. Those young men were taken alive, alive I want them returned to us’.

    A vain hope against hope, but also a challenge to an indifferent government to account for itself. In this the families are supported, not only by regular mass demonstrations by hundreds of thousands of citizens, but by the international community.

    The former mayor of Guerrero Angel Aguirre’s brother-in-law is leader of the Guerreros Unidos narco-trafficking gang, to whom the abducted students were delivered. Aguirre and his wife fled to Mexico City, where they were found – but not arrested or questioned. Small wonder: the citizens of Guerrero have little faith either in Aguirre’s replacement or in the federal police force. ‘They threw out the local thugs and imposed others from Mexico. They have substituted the bad with the worse,’ says journalist Magali Tercero.

    Meanwhile President Peña Nieto has scandals of his own to preoccupy him: his wife Angelica is implicated in the purchase of a $11m second home, claiming it was bought with severance money from a TV soap. Allegations of corruption extend to her co-purchaser, awarded not only numerous governmental property development contracts but also the sole  concession to supply a new cross-country bullet train, with major Chinese investment.

    Mexico also has other currency earners to consider. Reports of mass graves, reeking with the smell of burning flesh, and of police and military answering to criminal gangs are not good for a tourism industry. The sense that in Mexico today – including in the beach resort of Acapulco, which is in Guerrero – one might be stepping on an undisclosed graveyard is hardly a tourist attraction. The flights I took to and from Mexico City were two-thirds empty. And agricultural production in the land that boasts 56 varieties of corn and chillies has here given way to poppies, making Mexico the world’s largest heroin producer after Afghanistan.

    No surprise that at the December Feria Internacional del Libro – the largest Hispanic book fair in the world and the biggest in its 18-year history – the 43 were everywhere with us.

    One of the few living authors from the 1960s boom, Elena Poniatowska, famous for writing Tlatelolco on the student massacre of 1968, repeated her commemoration of that event by explicitly linking it to the present, bringing each disappeared student to life with the name, age and a description of the character of each. She also deplored the fact that President Peňa Nieto had dared to appropriate the chant of Yo soy Ayotzinapa (I am Ayotzinapa) after doing nothing to bring the guilty to justice. Everyone in the crammed hall sang it then at full volume.

    Authors of the standing of Juan Villoro, Jorge Volpi and Ana Garc’ia Berguera opened their sessions with a countdown of the 43 students. ‘As writers we are all deeply wounded by what took place at Ayotzinapa,’ said Ana García Berguera and read from David Huerta’s epic poem, Ayotzinapa – circulated throughout the FIL, according to PEN, in many languages – including the line ‘our hearts are ousted from their place at our centre’ and the lines:

    Whoever reads this must also know

    That despite everything

    The dead have not departed

    Nor have they disappeared.

    Panels with speakers such as Darío Ramírez, of Article 19, and journalists Lydia Cacho and Carmen Aristegui were overflowed into video-linked public spaces. International authors including Claudio Magris (Italy); Bernardo Atxaga (Basque Country); Gioconda Belli (Nicaragua) and Andrés Neuman (Argentina) spoke out there and are, we assume, speaking out in their home countries too.

    At every event, students emblazoned with the number 43 spoke out in solidarity, and badges of support were distributed. Flash mobs appeared of young people fleeing through the crowded halls before suddenly ‘dropping down dead’ on the floor while the chant went up counting down from 43. The organisers boldly encouraged ongoing discussion, and the local media – which includes local Mexican PEN members and activists – provided wide coverage.

    In Mexico, PEN made clear the common cause between students, teachers, writers and readers – every one of us. Mexican PEN director – and author – Aline Davidoff highlighted the fact that of all the writers who speak out, journalists are bound to be first in the firing line. That is, unless they bow to intimidation and self-censorship. She commented that: ‘Here in Mexico we have a state of impunity where government and organised crime meet.’

    Of course, writers and journalists overlap, and here is what Juan Villoro, both writer and journalist, published in the Spanish daily El País on 30th October 2014, five weeks after the students’ abduction: ’43 future teachers have disappeared. The size of this tragedy comes down to a single phrase, one that opposes impunity, disgrace and injustice. The Mexico of guns and arms is afraid of those who teach others how to read.’

    The students’ families want nothing more than the return of their loved ones. Alive and – at worst, or – with a full account of what has happened to them. They also believe that only international pressure, particularly with the support of organisations such as PEN, can force the government to properly investigate their disappearance. In the words of Raúl Isidro Burgos: ‘We beg for international support so that this crisis does not remain ours alone. What we now suffer on a daily basis has to become the responsibility of the government, which to date has taken no responsibility at all.’

    (Image Brett Gundlock / Getty Images)

  • ‘I can read’: life and death in Guerrero

    Juan Villoro writes about the recent abductions and murders of students in Mexico, and how they fit a pattern not only of violence but uprising against injustice, as was the case with primary school teacher turned revolutionary Lucio Cabañas in the 1970s.

    Originally published in El País, 30 October 2014. Translated from the Spanish by Sophie Hughes.

    On 17 October, a group gathered outside the interior ministry in Mexico City to hold a vigil over the body of Margarita Santizo Bucareli. They were honouring the last wish of the deceased woman who had searched to no avail for her disappeared son. The scene was an allegory for a country where politics threatens to turn into a series of funeral rites.

    Mexico’s spiral of violence reached new levels on 26 September with the assassination of six young men and women and the kidnapping of 43 students from the Ayotzinapa Teacher Training College in the province of Guerrero. That day, I happened to be in the same province, in the Guerrero Autonomous University to give a conference on the Mexican communist writer, José Revueltas. My host was a professor who, in his youth, had belonged to Lucio Cabañas’ guerilla group. ‘Lucio Cabañas saved my life,’ he said with a strange mixture of admiration and sadness: ‘He ordered me back down the mountain before they killed the people living there: “You don’t look like a campesino (‘peasant’),” he told me. “If they find you here, they’re not going to believe you’re here to grow vegetables; you have to keep up the fight where you’re most useful: in the classroom.”‘

    The guerrilla’s order meant the end of a young man’s dream; at the same time it meant that the life of one social activist was spared.

    The great paradox of the state of Guerrero is that teaching there is a high-risk profession. Cabañas himself became a primary school teacher. He soon learnt that it was impossible to educate a child who did not have food to eat. Together with another teacher, Genaro Vázquez, he headed a movement to improve the lives of his pupils; they came up against official closed-mindedness and so needed to radicalise their line of action.

    The promotion of literary culture has remained a challenge in an area that settles its differences with bullets. In the seventies, two-thirds of Guerrero’s population were illiterate. The Ayotzinapa Teacher Training College was founded with a view to improving this figure, but it wasn’t impervious to the state’s bigger problems: social inequality, the control of the caciques (‘overlords’), governmental corruption at local level, repressive measures as the sole solution to civil unrest, police impunity, and the growing intrusion of drug trafficking. The rest of the country is not immune to these evils. What makes Guerrero stand out is its long history of popular movements that challenge these disgraces.

    In the book México armado – essential reading for anyone attempting to understand this conflict – Laura Castellanos explores this transition from professor to guerilla. Genaro Vázquez founded an Asociación Cívica (‘Civic Association’), which was repudiated by the authorities. Lucio Cabañas set up the Partido de los pobres (Poor People’s Party), but it failed to have any impact on local politics. The government offered its leaders money and political positions (in Guerrero, the two things tend to be synonymous). The leaders rejected this ‘negotiated’ get-out and opted instead for heading up into the mountain.

    The fierce repression of the guerrillas was known as The Dirty War – a redundant euphemism. After Cabañas’ death there were 173 ‘disappearances’. In México armado, Castellanos tells the story of the airbase in Pie de la Cuesta, in Acapulco, where planes would take off to then dump dissidents into the ocean, the same ruthless method that would be used in Chile and Argentina.

    We were talking about José Revueltas and Lucio Cabañas when we heard that six young people had been killed in the town of Iguala. The news was made worse by the knowledge that the horror was not new; on the contrary, and as we had been hearing that day, it had a long history. The violence in Guerrero has been systematically fuelled by military and paramilitary group-organised massacres. Luis Hernández Navarro, author of a crucial book on this problem (Hermanos en armas), points out that every one of the region’s insurrections have occurred after massacres (the one in Iguala in 1962 resulted in the Genaro Vázquez uprising; the one in Atoyac in 1967 was followed by Lucio Cabañas’; and the Aguas Blancas massacre in 1995 preceded the rise of the Popular Revolutionary Army).

    What will the upshot of the 2014 massacre be? Drug trafficking has gained power in Guerrero thanks to the continual, alternating presence of the cartels La Familia, Nueva Generación, the Beltrán Leyva and Guerreros Unidos. But this isn’t the main reason for the region’s decline. Carnival and apocalypse cohabit this bipolar area. The tourist hotspot that is Acapulco and the riches of the caciques exist in stark relief to the extreme poverty that affects the majority of the population. The shocking inequality accounts for the general sense of disgruntlement and offers one explanation for why many people cannot find a better fate than to farm marijuana or kill for fees.

    In the search for the disappeared teacher trainees, other mass graves have been uncovered, containing more dead. Between 2005 and today, no less than 38 tombs of this kind have appeared.

    For half a century, a poor but politicised population has condemned their authorities’ continued abuses. The Ayotzinapa College is a nerve centre of the dispute. Let’s not forget that in the seventies, one of its activists was a certain Lucio Cabañas.

    On 26 September, there were four separate shootings and one target: the young. With the backing of organised criminals, the local mayor spread terror among the trainee teachers, threatening them as they gathered in peaceful protest to remember the victims of the 1968 Tlatelolco massacre. Once the repressive mechanism was unleashed, they proceeded to open fire against a coach carrying a football team on their way home from a match. Their crime? Being young. Which is to say, potential rebels.

    ‘There is a tension between reading and political action,’ writes the Argentinian philosopher and novelist Ricardo Piglia. Interpreting the world can naturally lead to the desire to transform it. Occasionally, writing, and orthography itself, is a political gesture that defies a barbaric order: ‘To read is to stand up to a hostile life,’ suggests Piglia in The Last Reader.

    Che Guevara spent his last night before being killed in an old, run-down schoolhouse. Already wounded, he sat contemplating a sentence written on the blackboard and said to the teacher: ‘It’s missing the accent.’ The sentence was ‘Yo sé leer’: ‘I can read.’ Knowing he was defeated, the guerrilla leader looked to another means of correcting reality.

    Years ago, a group of teachers railed in by the government decided to take up arms in Guerrero. Lucio Cabañas chose to save one of his men and send him back to the classroom, to teaching – an instrument of war in a lawless country.

    Forty-three future teachers have disappeared.  The size of this tragedy comes down to single phrase, one that opposes impunity, disgrace and injustice: ‘Yo sé leer.’ The Mexico of guns and arms is afraid of those who teach others how to read.

    Mexico is missing the accent. The time will come to correct this.

  • 'I can read': life and death in Guerrero

    Juan Villoro writes about the recent abductions and murders of students in Mexico, and how they fit a pattern not only of violence but uprising against injustice, as was the case with primary school teacher turned revolutionary Lucio Cabañas in the 1970s.

    Originally published in El País, 30 October 2014. Translated from the Spanish by Sophie Hughes.

    On 17 October, a group gathered outside the interior ministry in Mexico City to hold a vigil over the body of Margarita Santizo Bucareli. They were honouring the last wish of the deceased woman who had searched to no avail for her disappeared son. The scene was an allegory for a country where politics threatens to turn into a series of funeral rites.

    Mexico’s spiral of violence reached new levels on 26 September with the assassination of six young men and women and the kidnapping of 43 students from the Ayotzinapa Teacher Training College in the province of Guerrero. That day, I happened to be in the same province, in the Guerrero Autonomous University to give a conference on the Mexican communist writer, José Revueltas. My host was a professor who, in his youth, had belonged to Lucio Cabañas’ guerilla group. ‘Lucio Cabañas saved my life,’ he said with a strange mixture of admiration and sadness: ‘He ordered me back down the mountain before they killed the people living there: “You don’t look like a campesino (‘peasant’),” he told me. “If they find you here, they’re not going to believe you’re here to grow vegetables; you have to keep up the fight where you’re most useful: in the classroom.”‘

    The guerrilla’s order meant the end of a young man’s dream; at the same time it meant that the life of one social activist was spared.

    The great paradox of the state of Guerrero is that teaching there is a high-risk profession. Cabañas himself became a primary school teacher. He soon learnt that it was impossible to educate a child who did not have food to eat. Together with another teacher, Genaro Vázquez, he headed a movement to improve the lives of his pupils; they came up against official closed-mindedness and so needed to radicalise their line of action.

    The promotion of literary culture has remained a challenge in an area that settles its differences with bullets. In the seventies, two-thirds of Guerrero’s population were illiterate. The Ayotzinapa Teacher Training College was founded with a view to improving this figure, but it wasn’t impervious to the state’s bigger problems: social inequality, the control of the caciques (‘overlords’), governmental corruption at local level, repressive measures as the sole solution to civil unrest, police impunity, and the growing intrusion of drug trafficking. The rest of the country is not immune to these evils. What makes Guerrero stand out is its long history of popular movements that challenge these disgraces.

    In the book México armado – essential reading for anyone attempting to understand this conflict – Laura Castellanos explores this transition from professor to guerilla. Genaro Vázquez founded an Asociación Cívica (‘Civic Association’), which was repudiated by the authorities. Lucio Cabañas set up the Partido de los pobres (Poor People’s Party), but it failed to have any impact on local politics. The government offered its leaders money and political positions (in Guerrero, the two things tend to be synonymous). The leaders rejected this ‘negotiated’ get-out and opted instead for heading up into the mountain.

    The fierce repression of the guerrillas was known as The Dirty War – a redundant euphemism. After Cabañas’ death there were 173 ‘disappearances’. In México armado, Castellanos tells the story of the airbase in Pie de la Cuesta, in Acapulco, where planes would take off to then dump dissidents into the ocean, the same ruthless method that would be used in Chile and Argentina.

    We were talking about José Revueltas and Lucio Cabañas when we heard that six young people had been killed in the town of Iguala. The news was made worse by the knowledge that the horror was not new; on the contrary, and as we had been hearing that day, it had a long history. The violence in Guerrero has been systematically fuelled by military and paramilitary group-organised massacres. Luis Hernández Navarro, author of a crucial book on this problem (Hermanos en armas), points out that every one of the region’s insurrections have occurred after massacres (the one in Iguala in 1962 resulted in the Genaro Vázquez uprising; the one in Atoyac in 1967 was followed by Lucio Cabañas’; and the Aguas Blancas massacre in 1995 preceded the rise of the Popular Revolutionary Army).

    What will the upshot of the 2014 massacre be? Drug trafficking has gained power in Guerrero thanks to the continual, alternating presence of the cartels La Familia, Nueva Generación, the Beltrán Leyva and Guerreros Unidos. But this isn’t the main reason for the region’s decline. Carnival and apocalypse cohabit this bipolar area. The tourist hotspot that is Acapulco and the riches of the caciques exist in stark relief to the extreme poverty that affects the majority of the population. The shocking inequality accounts for the general sense of disgruntlement and offers one explanation for why many people cannot find a better fate than to farm marijuana or kill for fees.

    In the search for the disappeared teacher trainees, other mass graves have been uncovered, containing more dead. Between 2005 and today, no less than 38 tombs of this kind have appeared.

    For half a century, a poor but politicised population has condemned their authorities’ continued abuses. The Ayotzinapa College is a nerve centre of the dispute. Let’s not forget that in the seventies, one of its activists was a certain Lucio Cabañas.

    On 26 September, there were four separate shootings and one target: the young. With the backing of organised criminals, the local mayor spread terror among the trainee teachers, threatening them as they gathered in peaceful protest to remember the victims of the 1968 Tlatelolco massacre. Once the repressive mechanism was unleashed, they proceeded to open fire against a coach carrying a football team on their way home from a match. Their crime? Being young. Which is to say, potential rebels.

    ‘There is a tension between reading and political action,’ writes the Argentinian philosopher and novelist Ricardo Piglia. Interpreting the world can naturally lead to the desire to transform it. Occasionally, writing, and orthography itself, is a political gesture that defies a barbaric order: ‘To read is to stand up to a hostile life,’ suggests Piglia in The Last Reader.

    Che Guevara spent his last night before being killed in an old, run-down schoolhouse. Already wounded, he sat contemplating a sentence written on the blackboard and said to the teacher: ‘It’s missing the accent.’ The sentence was ‘Yo sé leer’: ‘I can read.’ Knowing he was defeated, the guerrilla leader looked to another means of correcting reality.

    Years ago, a group of teachers railed in by the government decided to take up arms in Guerrero. Lucio Cabañas chose to save one of his men and send him back to the classroom, to teaching – an instrument of war in a lawless country.

    Forty-three future teachers have disappeared.  The size of this tragedy comes down to single phrase, one that opposes impunity, disgrace and injustice: ‘Yo sé leer.’ The Mexico of guns and arms is afraid of those who teach others how to read.

    Mexico is missing the accent. The time will come to correct this.

  • Instructions for writing a corrupt novel

    Nepotism, sinecures, blackmailing paedophiles, bribing officials… Juan Pablo Villalobos writes for PEN Atlas this week, explaining how a writer can expose and enable the general corruption of his countryThe writer is preparing to write a corrupt novel, a novel that reflects the state of general corruption in his country, which – let’s say – is called Mexico. It’s not a question of writing a novel about corruption, no, that wouldn’t be at all original or provocative. What he’s trying to do is to write a novel in a corrupt way, trying to imitate the corruption that prevails in his country. And so before picking up his pen, or switching on his computer, before even coming up with an idea that might become a novel, what he needs is peace and quiet to write the novel, he needs a salary so as not to have to worry about a matter as banal as money as he writes his masterpiece, the corrupt novel. But the writer can’t have a job, no, if he has to follow a schedule from nine in the morning to five in the evening, when is he going to write the corrupt novel? And this is where the corrupt novel starts: at the moment the writer asks his uncle (it could be his father, a cousin, a buddy, even a childhood friend), who turns out to be the deputy minister in some government department (he could be a secretary, a civil servant, a chief of staff, whatever) to put him on the payroll, without him being employed, that is, to employ him as what is known in Mexico as an ‘aviator,’ or a phantom employee. Great: now the writer has a salary without having to work and can devote himself to what really matters, to writing the corrupt novel. But there’s a problem, now that he thinks about it: his computer is old, and it’s not a Mac! Plus he doesn’t have a printer. And so he calls up his uncle (or cousin, or buddy, or whoever it is) and his uncle takes a Mac and an HP printer out of the federal budget. Perfect, now it really is time to start writing, to think about the novel’s structure, for in order to be a corrupt novel it must be governed by the principle of maximum economic efficiency. That is to say: how can I get more money out of my corrupt novel? This has nothing to do with thinking about sales of the novel, oh no. We can think about that later. Right now it has to do with thinking about getting money from the contents of the novel – what is the theme of the corrupt novel? Two options make themselves quite clear to our writer: extortion or publicity. Find a theme that could make things awkward for a person or a company and demand money for him not to write the novel. Or offer to write the novel praising a personality or a company, so that it functions as a veiled form of publicity, as propaganda. And why not both these things? Why not extortion first, and then veiled publicity? Brilliant. The writer finally gets down to work. He extorts money from a paedophile. Then he sells the project of writing a novel to the government of one of the central states in the country (it could be the north or the south, too). It will be a great corrupt novel about the magnificent achievements of the state governor. An epic the likes of which has not been written since the novels of the revolution. But the writer of the corrupt novel cannot write and, in any case, is far too busy spending: a) the money from his aviator’s salary, b) the extortion money, and c) the advance paid him by the state government. And so, for a ridiculous wage, he hires an intern, a young, very enthusiastic kid who’s attended eight hundred literary workshops. It’s an ingenious strategy: the corrupt novel can only be written by a literary ghost writer. While the literary ghost writer drafts the novel, the writer must concern himself with the things that really matter when dealing with a corrupt novel: the publication and mass-marketing of the book. Who is going to publish the corrupt novel? Easy. Here his deputy minister uncle (brother or father) again comes into play, as well as the governor who is the protagonist of the corrupt novel, who both bribe the owner of a publishing house to publish it. Sorted. And it’s not even a cash bribe, no – it’s a promise that the government, by way of the system of state schools, the network of libraries and the various programmes encouraging reading, will buy thousands of copies of the corrupt novel. The circle is complete when thousands of shelves in bookshops throughout the country are filled with copies of the corrupt novel. It’s now that the corrupt writer will reveal the true story of the corrupt novel, its genesis and development, will explain to everyone that the corrupt novel was actually a performance to expose the generalized state of corruption in the country. But as he is about to do so, just as he is about to upload to his blog (and to Twitter and Facebook) a text with the explanation, he receives the offer of a tremendous bribe if he decides to keep his mouth shut (if he doesn’t accept, he will have to live with the consequences). And the writer, who over the course of writing the novel has been converted to corruption, the writer who is now a corrupt writer, takes the bribe and keeps quiet.Additional InformationRead the original piece in Spanish.About the authorJuan Pablo Villalobos was born in Guadalajara, Mexico, in 1973. After eight years in Barcelona he lives now in Brazil. He has two Mexican-Brazilian-Catalan-Italian children. His first novel, Down the Rabbit Hole, was published in Spanish in 2010 and is being translated into fourteen languages. His second novel Quesadillas was published in English in 2013. He writes for different magazines, newspapers and blogs of Mexico, Spain, Brazil and Colombia.RosalindHarvey_Pro-picAbout the translatorRosalind Harvey lives in Bristol where she translates Hispanic fiction. In 2011 she was one of the first translators in residence at the Free Word Centre in London. Her translation of Juan Pablo Villalobos’ debut novel Down the Rabbit Hole was shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award and the Oxford-Weidenfeld Prize, and her co-translation of Dublinesque by Enrique Vila-Matas was shortlisted for the 2013 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize. She is a committee member of the Translators Association, a founding member and chair of the Emerging Translators Network, and also runs regular translation-related events in and around London. Her most recent translation is Villalobos’ Quesdillas, with And Other Stories. 

  • Imagine – Writing fiction in Mexico

    Juan Pablo Villalobos returns to PEN Atlas this week, asking us to imagine the struggle of being a writer in Mexico, where fiction is so often outpaced by brutal reality

    Translated from the Spanish by Rosalind Harvey

    Imagine you were born in a country called Mexico. Imagine you’re a novelist, that you want to write fiction. Imagine that your stories take place in Mexico, that your characters are Mexicans, that they speak Spanish. Imagine you tune in to a Mexican radio station each morning (you don’t actually tune in, what you actually do is activate an app on your mobile phone). Imagine what you hear: that twelve people have disappeared from an after-hours nightclub in Mexico City, that no one has the slightest idea what happened. They simply vanished. Just imagine. And that day you have to write a story, you’re writing a story for an American magazine. A detective story, this is what they’ve asked you for: a story that describes ‘the contradictions in Latin America’. And you think: what shall I write? But on the radio the ex-wife of a Supreme Court judge is talking about how she has spent a year in jail, her husband’s revenge on her for a lawsuit over the amount of child maintenance he has to pay. For children, moreover, who have autism. Just imagine. Then you remember it’s your little sister’s birthday, the one who still lives in the town where you were born and raised. And so you call her to say happy birthday and after the usual phrases for marking birthdays, you ask her how things are down there. An innocent question. And your sister tells you that last weekend six youths disappeared from the town (your sister says ‘kids’, not youths). Just imagine. She says that so far this year, twenty five people have disappeared.  In that town where nothing ever happened. In that boring town where your second novel was set. And you have to write a story. And what’s more, you’re writing your third novel, a novel that is also about Mexico. How to write? What to write? How to defy reality with literature, when reality is slamming into you and crushing you and making you feel that your poor, ordinary imagination can never catch up with it, can never even get close? Imagine writing fiction in Mexico. You recall a few facts: eighty thousand deaths and twenty five thousand disappearances in the ‘war on drugs’ from 2006 to 2012; eighty journalists murdered. Then you think of your brother, who suffered extortion. Of your best friend, your childhood friend, who was abducted and pushed to the ground in a field of corn with a pistol to his head, waiting for the coup de grace. Just imagine. Imagine being pushed to the ground in the middle of the countryside, listening to someone shouting at you: If you move I’ll fuck you up! Then they tell you to get up and start walking away. With your eyes shut. And you get up and you try to walk but you trip and you fall and you trip and you fall again. Because you’re convinced they’re going to shoot you in the back. You have no doubt you are going to die. Imagine you’re going to die from being shot in the back. Then they say: You, open your eyes, asshole. And finally you can move and you walk and they don’t shoot you, they’ve only stolen your car, your money, a laptop, an iPad, a mobile phone. You’re still alive but something died inside of you (Mexico died for you, imagine that, your own country dies inside your body), and you become paranoid. And when the following day someone calls you in the middle of the night – a wrong number – you swear you’re being spied on, so you pack a suitcase and go straight to the airport and you get on a plane that will take you anywhere, somewhere far away, while you swear, you swear on your mother’s life that you’re going to get the fuck away from Mexico, that you’re going to go to Canada, or the United States, or Europe, who cares. Just imagine. You, sitting there, thinking about the plot of a story and a novel while all this reality comes down on you, obliterating you. The page in front of you blank due to all the accumulated rage. How do you get rid of this rage? How about by speaking out? What about that time you spoke about the terrible things happening in Mexico at an event abroad, what about that look the cultural attaché from the Mexican embassy gave you – remember? – what about the hour-long speech he gave about the indisputable achievements of the government you had to put up with while he drove you to the airport. One hour of listening to figures from this fantasy country, maybe now you’ll wise up about what’s really going on there. Just imagine. Demagogy travels in Mexico’s fleet of diplomatic cars. But the radio keeps on going and there’s more news: your favourite newspaper has just apologised to a corrupt state governor for not having provided enough proof of the corruption scandal it had uncovered. The governor’s lawyers are more powerful than the lawyers of your favourite newspaper – what’s new, this you can no doubt imagine. You listen to the editor-in-chief of the paper, whom you admire, coming out with what you don’t think he believes, a mollifying statement, because otherwise the governor’s vultures will swoop down onto the newspaper and take away its last cent. What’s important is that the paper survives, that it tries to continue informing people about what is happening in the country. Even if it means saying sorry. Just imagine. Your rage spills over. You cannot write in this state. It’s impossible even to think. Impossible to live. It shouldn’t be possible to live. But it is, yes, it is. It has to be possible. You have to write. And so you take a breath, and you look at the blank page in front of you. You pick up your pen. And you start to write.

     

    About the author

    Juan Pablo Villalobos was born in Guadalajara, Mexico, in 1973. He studied marketing and Spanish literature. He has done a great deal of market research and published travel stories and literary and film criticism. He has researched such diverse topics as the influence of the avant-garde on the work of César Aira and the flexibility of pipelines for electrical installations. He now lives in Brazil and has two Mexican-Brazilian-Italian-Catalan children.

    About the translator

    Rosalind Harvey has lived in Lima and Norwich, where she fell in love with Spanish and translation, respectively. She now lives in London, where she translates Hispanic fiction. Quesadillas is her translation of Villalobos’s most recent novel, and her previous translation of Down the Rabbit Hole was shortlisted for the Guardian First Book award. She is the co-translator with Anne McLean of Hector Abad’s prize-winning memoir Oblivion, and Dublinesque by Enrique Vila-Matas. Last autumn she was one of Free Word Centre’s first ever translators-in-residence.

    Additional information

    Read the original piece in Spanish.

    Find out more information about Juan Pablo Villalobos’s new book, Quesadillas.

    Juan Pablo Villalobos and his translator Rosalind Harvey will be appearing at Waterstone’s Norwich this evening September 3rd, at 7.30pm.

    He will also be appearing at Mr B’s in Bath on September 4th at 7.00pm

    Juan will be speaking with Deborah Levy, at Keats House, London, September 5th 7.00pm

    Finally, please join English PEN, and And Other Stories for Juan Pablo Villalobos in conversation with DBC Pierre, at the Rich Mix, Bethnal Green, London, on Friday September 6th, from 7.00pm. This event will be hosted by Shane Solanki with music from special guest DJs Moshi Moshi Records.

    Find out more information on these events, and how to book.