Even after the controversial year of 1968, the contemporary Spanish-American essay generally left behind earlier utopian thinking as a basis for renewal of the form. The continent’s realities have simply been too cruel to support a life based on illusions, and sociopolitical crises, at least since the 1980s, have exacerbated the need to put the essay’s past in perspective. A number of writers from Mexico and Central America born in the 1950s and after 1968 are less concerned with credibility or reflecting on the social conditions that surround them, opting instead for a personalism whose hybridity does not rise to the level of autofiction, though occasionally bordering on victimhood (whose causes usually turn out to be more real) and other “first world” practices. If this turn is not tied to total escapism, it is clear that these same writers, in their narratives, show a commitment that’s more aesthetic than political. However, as other writers in this issue will affirm, the practice itself—writing in the broadest sense of the term—is undergoing drastic changes which could become greater still with artificial intelligence and other laboratories of the future.
In 2006, when John Skirius published the fifth and most recent edition of El ensayo hispanoamericano del siglo XX, still the most popular textbook for undergraduate teaching of the continent’s essay, the Mexicans and Central Americans included since the first edition in 1981 were José Vasconcelos, Rubén Darío, and Alfonso Reyes. Gradually, the cast changed slightly to include Miguel Ángel Asturias, Luis Cardoza y Aragón, Octavio Paz (not Carlos Fuentes), Elena Poniatowska (not Rosario Castellanos), Gabriel Zaid, and Carlos Monsiváis, with the Mexicans—particularly the latter, with his Aires de familia: Cultura y sociedad en América Latina (2000; Family Resemblance: Culture and Society in Latin America), and the omitted Sergio Pitol—having the greatest amount of influence. In a comparable anthology, the extensive volumes of Los novelistas como críticos (1991-1992; Novelists as Critics), edited by Wilfrido H. Corral and Norma Klahn, the youngest authors were born in 1947. Neither anthology, therefore, had to confront the question of how to proceed with recent generations when configuring their representativeness in the history of the genre.
In this sense, it may be beneficial to consider a statement by Walter Benjamin from roughly ninety years ago about new generations: he advised them not to use the “I” before turning thirty. Among the negative characteristics he notes in “Characterization of the New Generation,” he refers to the role of technique when it comes to success, and it’s a relative thing when he says that they write consumer literature, that they lack education and consistency, or when he alleges that “these people make not the slightest attempt to base their activities on any theoretical foundations whatsoever. They are not only deaf to the so-called great questions, those of politics or world views; they are equally innocent of any fundamental reflection on questions of art” (401).Footnote1 It is obviously a question of how time, critics, or the public misrepresent the ideas they have received. Apart from the “theoretical” requirement, that kind of mutatis mutandis reaction is becoming more common since the turn of the century and, with it, a flurry of permutations.
Along with Mexico’s output, more academic attention is given there to the study of the genre, particularly in numerous individual works and compilations by Leopoldo Zea, Horacio Cerutti Guldberg, and Liliana Weinberg, though less so to the hybridity of “novelists as critics.” Among these, the prolific Juan Villoro, Enrique Serna, Guillermo Fadanelli, David Toscana, Álvaro Enrigue, and Cristina Rivera Garza would allow us to reflect on a new canon for the Mexican essay. If the Crack generation of writers (who emerged in the late nineties) are dedicated to nonfiction, Jorge Volpi in particular, their visibility is due more to the affiliations and vicissitudes of that group than to any inherent value or novel contribution of their nonfiction. For more recent generations, those born in the seventies and eighties, we find a continuous dissolution of genres, in their journalism, in the “novelistic essay,” or the “essayistic novel,” and in this sense it is the women who stand out, Guadalupe Nettel, Valeria Luiselli, and Fernanda Melchor in particular.
A Mexico Without Utopias
Among those included here from Mexico, Carmen Boullosa is a long-standing intellectual figure. Well established in the United States, she has published many essays, and the titles and bilingualism of her later books indicate a cultural mobility that is becoming more and more common among Mexican writers. Boullosa’s essay collections began with Papeles irresponsables (1989; Irresponsible Roles), to eventually include the very personal Cuando me volví mortal (2010; When I Became Mortal), Azúcar negra (2013; Black Sugar), and Rosario Castellanos (2021), while she also moved on to bilingual compilations such as Cuando México se (re)apropia de Texas / When Mexico Recaptures Texas (2015). With Mike Wallace, she published Narcohistoria: Cómo Estados Unidos y México crearon juntos la guerra contra las drogas (2016), which appeared the same year in English (A Narco History: How the United States and Mexico Jointly Created the "Mexican Drug War"). Subsequently, with Alberto Quintero, she co-edited Let’s Talk about Your Wall: Mexican Writers Respond to the Immigration Crisis (2020), texts mostly written originally in Spanish.
That cultural mobility is evident in Jazmina Barrera as well. In an interview in Hispamérica,Footnote2 Barrera says that she was initiated into the essayistic-feministic hybridity by Virginia Woolf and Rosario Castellanos, seeing in the fragmentation of Margo Glantz “a model of experimental, hybrid, courageous writing, something very different from what was being written during (her) generation” (78). That lineage is noticeable in the essays Foreign Body / Cuerpo extraño (2013), Cuaderno de faros (2019; On Lighthouses, 2020), and Línea negra: ensayo de novela sobre embarazos y terremotos (2020; Línea negra, 2022). When Barrera is asked why, in Línea Negra, she asserts that she’s always wanting to write essays, she responds with what has been her poetics to this day: “In the Anglo-Saxon tradition, the division between nonfiction and fiction is much more common than it is in Spanish … I prefer to think about literary projects and literary tools from which I can take what’s associated with essays, narratives, and poetry. For me, all of that is available. Every good text is an essay because it talks about an experiment or it talks about a process, a performance” (79, emphasis my own). Even for the much-vilified binary of “form and content,” there are no longer utopian positions.
Regarding Julián Herbert, a rock musician as well as perhaps the most chemically pure Mexican narrator other than Melchor, in an essay on contemporary Mexican novels and the testimonial value of representing violence, he seems to speak of himself when stating, “What place does traditional fiction, the space of the novel, occupy in contemporary Mexico when we talk about broadening and understanding and registering the voice of the victims?” (31, his emphasis).Footnote3 For him, “it is about gaps,” for which “it helps to build an integrative, cognitive identity, a collection of events, to a certain extent, especially when it incorporates choral-like techniques that aren’t omniscient but rather multiplicity incarnate, something that takes the shape of a cognitive palimpsest” (31), a compositional practice based on Benjamin’s ideas about allegory, about the “dialectical image” and signs of the flowing of events (32, 33). Herbert cannot be read fully without accounting for this kind of hybridity in his novels, especially La casa del dolor ajeno: crónica de un pequeño genocidio en la laguna (2015; The House of the Pain of Others, 2019), or in the novels by Melchor and Luiselli which he discusses (34-35). That chorality is evident in the many essays on literature that he has written. He ends his essay by emphasizing the centrality of activism and narrative journalism to recover the collective experience of violence, endured in different ways throughout Latin America, concluding that “fictional literature occupies an equally important place, because its cognitive and aesthetic tools generate a more intimate and comprehensive revelation of historical phenomena” (35).
Dystopian Central America
In Entre paréntesis (2004; Between Parentheses, 2011), Roberto Bolaño argues that, when discussing Guatemala, “one thinks about Miguel Ángel Asturias, Augusto Monterroso, and now Rodrigo Rey Rosa, three giant writers from a small, unhappy country.” This pertains not only to the novel but also to the essay, particularly in the wholesale disobedience of the latter two. If there are studies and controversies regarding Costa Rican essay writing (with José Coronel Urtecho at the helm) or about the Nicaraguan Sergio Ramírez, currently the most representative essayist from that region, there are no analyses that point to shared characteristics among the countries of Mesoamerica or with the rest of the Americas. But there is discussion, as with Mexico, about generations prior to those represented in this issue of Review, although in Review 101 (December 2020) Ramírez was the only Central American selected to appear. On the other hand, in issue No. 12 (January-June 2006) of the online magazine Istmo, dedicated to “El ensayo en Centroamérica: Hacia el rescate de un género marginado” (The Essay in Central America: Toward the Rescue of a Marginalized Genre), edited by Werner Mackenbach and Alexandra Ortiz Wallner, the prose writer most represented is Ramírez, while more recent writers, and one master more recognized than all the others, Monterroso, remain understudied.
However, in these times of crises, Horacio Castellanos Moya, Honduran by birth but Salvadoran by choice and by culture, is undoubtedly the most internationally known Central American writer. Despite the fact that his nomadism has allowed him to experience different cultural spheres (for example, his friendship with Bolaño while working as a journalist in Mexico), there is always an expectation abroad about Latin American writers’ political commitment. In his succinct 2008 analysis, “Lo político en la novela latinoamericana” (Political Aspects in the Latin American Novel), included in La metamorfosis del sabueso: Ensayos personales y otros textos (2021; The Metamorphosis of the Bloodhound: Personal Essays and Other Texts), Castellanos Moya begins by stating “if someone tells me that I write ‘political novels,’ I immediately put myself on guard,” specifying that “first, I don’t like to qualify the fiction I write … second, in this day and age, the word ‘political’ is extremely discredited, as are politicians themselves” (34). Equally clear and direct—and personal—are two of his other compilations: Envejece un perro tras los cristales: Cuaderno de Tokio seguido de Cuaderno de Iowa (2019; A Dog Ages on the Other Side of the Window: Tokyo Notebook, followed by Iowa Notebook) and Roque Dalton: correspondencia clandestina y otros ensayos (2021; Roque Dalton: Secret Correspondence and Other Essays), which includes his essay in this issue.
From this perspective, it is more than feasible, especially owing to the narrative hybridity from which it arises, to consider the nonfiction of Rodrigo Rey Rosa (La cola del dragon: No ficciones, 2014; The Dragon’s Tail: Nonfictions) and its international reception, despite the fact that his fiction has been published in English by prestigious houses. Another similar author is the Guatemalan Eduardo Halfón, widely translated into English and author of the brief and almost auto-hagiographic Biblioteca bizarra (2018; Bizarre Library). These collections were published in Spain, so it remains to be seen whether editions will be available in their home countries or the rest of Latin America. Efforts to publicize essay writing in the region are concentrated in Costa Rica, and Identidad, invención y mito: Ensayos escogidos (2010; Identity, Invention, and Myth: Selected Essays), compiled by Marianela Camacho Alfaro, is the most representative endeavor.
Even if this collection revives two authors who deserve more attention, Yolanda Oreamuno Unger (who passed away in 1956) and Carmen Naranjo Coto (who died in 2012), the problem of national publishing has still affected the Salvadoran-Nicaraguan Claribel Alegría (1924-2018), author of the fine collection of biological sketches Mágica tribu (Magic Tribe), published in Spain in 2007. And it continues to affect the Salvadoran Jacinta Escudos, author of Crónicas para sentimentales (2010; Chronicles for Sentimental People), published in Guatemala, with “Lecturas para misántropos modernos” (Readings for Modern Misanthropes) and the eponymous chronicle as standouts. It is also worth pausing to reflect on the Costa Rican Carlos Cortés (1962), a keen writer whose work takes place during the same time frame as the Mexican Crack generation and Latin America’s more inclusive McOndo movement. Dedicated to his country in La invención de Costa Rica (2003), the first chapter of which is included in Camacho Alfaro’s compilation, as well as La gran novela perdida: Historia personal de la narrativa costarrisible (2007, 2010; The Great Lost Novel: Personal History of Costaridiculous Narrative), his most important essays are collected in a magnificent edition published by La Pereza Ediciones in Miami titled La tradición del presente: El fin de la literatura universal y la narrativa latinoamericana (2015; The Tradition of the Present: The End of Universal Literature and Latin American Narrative). It is hard to believe that this book, praised by Volpi, has yet to garner its due reception, not only for asking difficult questions and providing extensive answers, but also for its cosmopolitanism, diversity, and not being at odds with the Western classics and some Latin Americans who are now a part of a “new world literature.”
What have these developments meant in practical terms? First, that the younger Mexican and Central American essayists have openly accepted the new paradigms of knowledge and dissemination, and that they do not pay much attention to the gatekeepers of yesteryear, something that seems obvious if the trenches dug by the region’s intellectual elites are disregarded. Second, that the differences between fact and truth are still important when it comes time to denounce injustices. Third, and distancing ourselves from the first two reasons, it is clear that they will continue struggling to make their aesthetic practice overcome the narrative techniques that have defined biographers, historians, and journalists, to produce a style that makes their nonfiction read like novels, perhaps without utopias. At this point, there is no way of knowing if one could ask for anything more.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Carlos Burgos Jara
Carlos Burgos Jara is a professor at the University of San Diego. In 2008, he published his first book, Entensión, about culture, literature, and politics in the nineteenth-century Andes. His essays have appeared in various journals in Latin America, Europe, and the United States, including Letras Libres, Casa de las Américas, Revista Iberoamericana, Latin American Literature Today, and Nuevo Texto Crítico.
Ezra E. Fitz
Ezra E. Fitz has translated over twenty books, including literary fiction by Alberto Fuguet and Eloy Urroz.
Notes
1 In Selected Writings. Volume 2, 1927-1934. Michael W. Jennings et al., eds. Trans. Rodney Livingstone et al. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999). Translations are mine unless noted otherwise.
2 Emily Hind, “Entrevista. Jazmina Barrera,” Hispamérica LI. 153 (December 2022), 77-83.
3 Julián Herbert, “Personaje en palimpsesto,” Letras Libres XXIV. 277 (January 2022), 30-35.