Estudios Urbanisticos Literatura Hispanoamericana

HISPANIC URBAN STUDIES
EDITED BY
JOSÉ EDUARDO GONZÁLEZ
AND TIMOTHY R. ROBBINS
URBAN SPACES IN
CONTEMPORARY LATIN
AMERICAN LITERATURE
Hispanic Urban Studies
Series Editors
Benjamin Fraser
East Carolina University
Greenville, NC, USA
Susan Larson
Texas Tech University
Lubbock, TX, USA
Hispanic Urban Studies is a series of scholarly monographs, edited vol-
umes, and translations focusing on Spanish, Latin American and US
Latino urban culture. The humanities and the social sciences are closer
in methodology than ever before. Hispanic Urban Studies serves a dual
purpose: to introduce radically original humanities work to social science
researchers while affirming the relevance of cultural production to dis-
cussions of the urban. This book series takes advantage of and further
contributes to exciting interdisciplinary discussions between Hispanic
Studies and Cultural Geography with the aim of bringing in new ideas
about space, place, and culture from all parts of the Hispanic world.
Monograph titles bring together analyses of the cultural production of
the Hispanic world with urban and spatial theory from a range of disci-
plinary contexts. The series also welcomes proposals for edited volumes
related to cities that contribute in creative ways to our understanding of
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introduce English-language readers to the rich legacy of materials on
urbanism, urban culture, and cultural geography originally published in
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About the series editors

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Advisory Board
Malcolm Compitello, University of Arizona, USA
Monica Degen Brunel, University, London, UK
Cecilia Enjuto Rangel, University of Oregon, USA
Amanda Holmes, McGill University, Canada
Marcy Schwartz, Rutgers University, USA
Álvaro Sevilla Buitrago, Polytechnic University of Madrid, Spain
Armando Silva, National University of Colombia, Bogotá
Michael Ugarte, University of Missouri, Columbia, USA
Víctor Valle, California Polytechnic State University, USA
More information about this series at

http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14872
José Eduardo González
Timothy R. Robbins
Editors
Urban Spaces in
Contemporary Latin
American Literature
Editors
José Eduardo González Timothy R. Robbins
Department of Modern Languages Languages and Literature Department
and Literatures Drury University
University of Nebraska-Lincoln Springfield, MO, USA
Lincoln, NE, USA
Hispanic Urban Studies

ISBN 978-3-319-92437-3 ISBN 978-3-319-92438-0 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-92438-0
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Contents
1 The Spatial Turn and Twenty-First Century Latin

American Fiction 1
José Eduardo González
2 Beyond the Ruins of the Organized City: Urban

Experiences Through the Metro in Contemporary
Mexican Literature 19
Liesbeth François
3 Spectral Spaces: Haunting in the Latin American City 47

Marta Sierra
4 A Tale of Three Cities: Urban Space in the Crack Novels

(1995–1997) 67
Tomás Regalado-López
5 The Night That Repeats Itself: Social Dystopia

in Managua, Salsa City (¡Devórame Otra Vez!),
by Franz Galich 93
Magdalena Perkowska
6 Urban Debris and Networking Imperialism

in Un Arte de Hacer Ruinas by Antonio José Ponte 117
Eduard Arriaga
v
vi Contents
7 Place-Making in the Solitude of the City: Valeria

Luiselli’s Los ingrávidos 137
Cecily Raynor
8 Dislocated Subjects in the Global City: Santiago

Gamboa’s Hotel Pekín 153
Camilo A. Malagón
9 Roberto Bolaño’s Urban Labyrinths: The City as

Metaphor for the Silent Universe 175
Juan Pablo Melo
10 The Tourist Aesthetic and Empire in Rodrigo

Fresán’s Mantra and Jardines de Kensington 193
Timothy R. Robbins
Index 217
Notes on Contributors
Eduard Arriaga is Assistant Professor of Global Languages and Cross-

Cultural Studies at University of Indianapolis. He is the author of Las
redes del gusto: exclusiones, inclusiones y desplazamientos en el campo de la
novela en Colombia: 1990–2005 (A Web of Tastes: Exclusions, Incursions,
and Displacements in the Colombian Novel: 1990–2005) and has also pub-
lished an introduction to literary theory in Spanish (Teoría Literaria I,
II, III. Bogotá, 2007). His areas of research include Digital Humanities,
Culture and Technology and Afro Latin-American and Afro-Latina/o
cultures, among others. His scholarly articles have appeared in journals
such as Digital Humanities Quarterly, Casa de las Américas and Revista
de Crítica Literaria Latinoamericana.
Liesbeth François is a Post-Doctoral Fellow at the University of Leuven
(Belgium). Her forthcoming book, Andares vacilantes. La caminata en
la obra narrativa de Sergio Chejfec, focuses on the concepts of walking
and space in the narrative of contemporary Argentine author Chejfec.
Her current post-doctoral research project is titled “The Depths of the
Megacity. Recent Literary Imaginaries of the Underground in Mexico
City.”
José Eduardo González is Associate Professor of Spanish and Ethnic
Studies at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He is the author of
Appropriating Theory: Ángel Rama’s Critical Work, published in 2017
by the University of Pittsburgh Press. He coedited with Timothy R.
Robbins New Trends in Latin American Narrative: Post-National
vii
viii Notes on Contributors
Literatures and the Canon (Palgrave, 2014), a collection of critical essays

on recent Latin American fiction. González is also the author of the
monograph Borges and the Politics of Form (Routledge).
Camilo A. Malagón is Assistant Professor of Spanish in the Department
of International Languages and Literatures and the Department of
English at St. Catherine University in Saint Paul, Minnesota, USA since
the fall of 2017. He researches contemporary Latin American liter-
ature, film and digital culture, with a focus on theories of space, place
and globalization. He finished his Ph.D. at Tulane University in 2017
with a dissertation entitled “Between the Global and the National:
Representations of Space in Contemporary Latin American Culture”
focused on works of narrative and film from Colombia, Brazil and
Argentina.
Juan Pablo Melo is a Ph.D. Candidate at Stanford University’s
Program in Modern Thought and Literature. His research interests
focus on architecture and urban history and theory, literary theory and
social theory. His dissertation looks at planning and design discourses in
Bogotá, Colombia in relation to material reconfigurations of the urban
landscape.
Magdalena Perkowska is Professor of Latin American Literature and
Culture at Hunter College and The Graduate Center, CUNY. She is the
author of a monograph on the new historical novel in Latin America,
Historias híbridas: la nueva novela histórica latinoamericana (1985–
2000) ante las teorías posmodernas de la historia. (Iberoamericana/
Vervuert, 2008), and a study of the relationship between narrative and
photography in contemporary Latin American fiction, titled Pliegues vis-
uales: narrativa y fotografía en la novela latinoamericana contemporánea
(Iberoamericana/Vervuert, 2013). Her articles have appeared in schol-
arly reviews such as Revista de Estudios Hispánicos, Romance Studies,
Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos, and Istmo. Revista virtual de
estudios literarios y culturales centroamericanos.
Cecily Raynor is Assistant Professor of Hispanic Studies and Digital
Humanities at McGill University. Her work on spatial representa-
tions in contemporary Latin American literature has been published in
the Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies, Digital Humanities
Quarterly, Brasil/Brazil: A Journal of Brazilian Literature, and Estudos
de Literatura Brasileira Contemporânea, among other venues. Her
Notes on Contributors ix
work in the Digital Humanities has received generous financial support

from two major Canadian granting agencies, the Social Sciences and
Humanities Research Council of Canada and the Fonds de recherche du
Québec—Société et culture. Dr. Raynor is currently finalizing her book
manuscript on local and global spatial practices in contemporary Latin
American literature.
Tomás Regalado-López is Associate Professor of Latin American litera-
ture at James Madison University. An expert on contemporary Mexican
literature, his latest book, Historia personal del Crack. Entrevistas críti-
cas was published in 2018. He has previously written a book about
Mexican writer, Jorge Volpi (La novedad de lo antiguo: la novela de Jorge
Volpi (1992–1999) y la tradición de la ruptura, 2009) and he coauthored
a book with the Mexican “Crack” writers (Crack. Instrucciones de uso,
2004).
Timothy R. Robbins is Associate Professor of Spanish at Drury
University. He is coauthor of Pop Culture in Latin America and the
Caribbean (2015, ABC-CLIO). He coedited with José Eduardo
González New Trends in Latin American Narrative: Post-National
Literatures and the Canon (Palgrave, 2014) a collection of critical essays
on recent Latin American fiction.
Marta Sierra is Professor of Modern Languages and Literatures at
Kenyon College. She is the author of Gendered Spaces in Argentine
Women’s Literature (Palgrave, 2012) and of the essay, in collabora-
tion with Karina Bidaseca, Postales femeninas desde el fin del mundo. El
sur y las políticas de la memoria. (Godot, 2012). She has edited several
collection of essays on feminism and Latin American culture, among
them Escrituras extremas. Feminismos libertarios en América Latina
(Biblos, 2016) and Transnational Borderlands: The Making of Cultural
Resistance in Women’s Global Networks (Palgrave, 2011). She is also
the editor of Legados, Genealogías y Memorias Poscoloniales en América
Latina: Escrituras fronterizas desde el Sur (Godot, 2014) and Geografías
Imaginarias: Espacios de Resistencia y crisis en América Latina (Cuarto
Propio, 2014).
CHAPTER 1
The Spatial Turn and Twenty-First Century

Latin American Fiction
José Eduardo González
The project of compiling a volume focusing on studying the representation

of the city in contemporary Latin American fiction originated as an upshot
of a previous attempt by Timothy R. Robbins and I to contribute to the
periodization of the most recent literary production in the region.1 The
main assumption driving our initial impulse was simple: not only has fic-
tional representation of the city always been a popular motif in literature, it
has been employed, more often that one would like to admit it, to contrast
literary styles, even literary periods. Even in the most sophisticated analyses,
James Joyce’s literary experiments never fail to be associated to the modern
urban life at the turn of the twentieth century. I am aware, of course, of
how problematic this could be as it postulates the existence of a mimetic
relationship between writers and the urban spaces (in both their histor-
ical and literary periods) that negates the authors’ artistic idiosyncrasies.
Because of this critical tradition, it became evident to me that it was equally
important to pay attention in this introduction to the way critics have read
that relationship between literature and the city—and, obviously, how that
J. E. González (*) 
Department of Modern Languages and Literatures,
University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Lincoln, NE, USA
© The Author(s) 2019 1

J. E. González and T. R. Robbins (eds.), Urban Spaces
in Contemporary Latin American Literature, Hispanic Urban Studies,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-92438-0_1
2 J. E. GONZÁLEZ
relationship has changed in the last couple of decades. As it often happens,

it is difficult to distinguish between how the literature of a period repre-
sents an object—the city, in this case—and how critics have interpreted that
representation. While the original question was essentially a problem about
literary history, it also became a problem about how to write literary his-
tory. This is a long way of saying that this volume about urban spaces in
twenty-first century fiction exists not only because the cities we inhabit now
are different from the ones in twentieth century Latin America, but also
because of the influence of the so-called “Spatial Turn” in contemporary
literary criticism.
The Spatial Turn refers to the current awareness of the need to study
the impact of space as a social construction in many aspects of our lives,
including the creation of cultural products.2 In the last couple of dec-
ades, the discipline of geography, especially human geography, has
become one of the most influential fields for both the humanities and
social sciences, while “recent works in the fields of literary and cultural
studies, sociology, political science, anthropology, history, and art his-
tory have become increasingly spatial in their orientation” (Warf and
Arias 2008, p. 1). Although both Foucault and Lefebvre theorized in the
1970s about the connection of space to the development of capitalism,
the current rise in spatial scholarship began during the 1990s and owes
a great deal to the work of David Harvey and Edward Soja.3 The latter
must also receive credit for bringing back the work of Lefebvre to the
attention of scholars when he devoted a large section of his seminal study
Postmodern Geographies (1989) to the encounter between modern geog-
raphy and Western Marxism. For the topic of the relationship between
literature and space, which is the focus of our attention, one could say
that there are at least two conceptualizations of space that originated
during the postmodern/poststructuralist period. One of them—strongly
associated to the views of Lefebvre and Foucault—defines space in terms
of domination. For the thinkers who adhere to this idea, explains Eric
Prieto, “space is not a neutral featureless void within which objects and
events are situated but a dimension that has been produced by social
forces that in turn constrain future possibilities” (2011, p. 17). This view
of space has led literary critics to look for traces of the constraining social
forces in their studies of literary geographies. The other one, which has
been repeatedly described by Bertrand Westphal in his work of geocriti-
cism, was best “summed up in Jacques Derrida’s laconic formula: Il n’y
pas de hors-texte. There is nothing outside the text” (2011, p. xii), thus
severing the link between reality and representation, and blocking the
1 THE SPATIAL TURN AND TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY LATIN … 3
possibility of analyzing the fictional depiction of space as referring to a

real world.4
Of these two ideas, it was the notion of space as produced or con-
structed that informed a group of studies that in the late 1990s joined
the Spatial Turn wave and began to change the literary analysis of urban
space in Latin America. For example, Marcy E. Schwartz’s Writing Paris
(1999), to mention one of the key texts from this period in the American
academia, researched the image of Paris in Latin American literature as
it changed throughout historical and artistic periods.5 “From Sarmiento
through the modernistas and regional writers,” explains Schwartz, “Latin
American writing has manipulated a cluster of conflicting desires asso-
ciated with Paris” (1999, p. 11). Sometimes seen as the source of pres-
tige and refinement, other times associated with “orgiastic decadence,”
the Paris described in these texts “is an imagined space that is reposi-
tory for cultural yearnings” (Schwartz 1999, p. 25). Both images of Paris
remained significant until early twentieth century and even later in some
cases. While most of Schwartz’s book studies the perception of Paris
in several canonical (male) figures, the last chapter is devoted to Luisa
Futoransky’s fiction and its innovative way of challenging the conven-
tional image of Paris produced by the Latin American literary tradition.
Her novels challenge common Parisian themes in Latin American writing

by revealing their gender bias and revising women’s passive roles. She most
critically rewrites the role of Paris in stories of sexual experimentation, tra-
ditionally presumed a male domain. Her female protagonist must reconfig-
ure the roles assigned to her in an anachronistic script written by and for
men in order to write openly about women’s search for sexual fulfillment.
(Schwartz 1999, p. 115)
A similar approach—to study first the tradition of spatial perception in

Latin American literature and culture and then to look for the challenges
to it, especially in the work of female writers—can also be perceived in
Amanda Holmes’s City Fictions (2007), which focuses on the discursive
relationship between language, body and the city in texts from the last
three decades of the last century. Interested in the meaning of the images
of fragmented bodies, Holmes mentions that “disquieting analogies for
the city in late twentieth-century Spanish American literature reflect an
oppressive political and economic environment” (2007, p. 25). The rel-
evance of space for determining genre relations is evident in Holmes’s
reading of Chilean writer Diamela Eltit’s Lumpérica.
4 J. E. GONZÁLEZ
Contrasts between the male and the female responses to this urban space
illustrate the multiple codification of this site, one that includes both the
extremities of a centralized dominating presence and the deteriorating
body of the urban inhabitant. The city’s hostile oppression of the female
body opposes the male ambivalence toward the space. …Sergio’s body is
described as “ausente” (absent) in relation to his surroundings, contrast-
ing dramatically with the pained presence of the female body. Sergio does
not even understand the feelings of oppression aroused by the city in the
female narrator. (2007, p. 138)
Without a doubt, the most significant work in the study of the city in
Latin American fiction in recent times has been done by feminist read-
ings of women writers’ fictional representations of urban space in a
male-dominated society like the previous two examples show. Here is
where the impact of the post-structuralist rethinking of the relationship
between urban space, power and the subject has yielded some of its most
important results. The gendering of urban space, which as we have seen
was only part of larger studies of the literary urban space in Schwartz
and Holmes, became the central emphasis of Unfolding the City, an
important collection of essays edited by Elisabeth Guerrero and Anne
Lambright focusing on how women “belonging to the intellectual and
professional elite, as well as to marginalized or disenfranchised groups,
negotiate their dwellings and articulate their urban lives” (2007, p. xi).
Collectively, the essays included in the volume, the editors assess, employ
a wide variety of literary texts to study how women writers decode the
“signs of the city,” “interpret race, ethnic, and class dynamics” (2007, p.
xii) or respond to contemporary disorder and the presence of mass media
in their urban environment (2007, p. xv).
A shared theme and target of critique for many of these feminist
approaches to literary geography has been the traditional relationship
between literature and the city in Latin America described in Ángel
Rama’s The Lettered City (1984).6 Rama’s well-known and influential
study argues that since colonial times a Latin American lettered elite or
letrados has existed in a relationship of dependency with the city. Latin
America provided a blank canvas on which Europeans could realize their
dream of creating a city from which they could control and mold real-
ity to their liking. The city became the center of power and one of the
ways it could use that power to order the surrounding environment was
through writing. The early lettered elite gained its prestige from its con-
nection to writing and to the city that validated the power of writing to
shape reality. As the original functions the city assigned to them changed,
the letrados saw the need to continuously reinvent themselves. In order
to protect their privileged position, with every major social change, intel-
lectuals needed to prove their usefulness to the political power. Rama’s
book recounts the history of the transformations that the letrados as a
social group, or the “lettered city,” as he calls them, undergo in their
search to protect their interests. After the book’s initials comments about
the connection between the foundations of the Latin American cities and
the power of the written word, the city becomes a synecdoche for polit-
ical power. In his historical overview of the letrados, Rama details the
social and political changes that took place from Colonial times to the
early twentieth century and how the lettered elite managed to fend most
attempts to question its connection to power. In Rama’s reading, the
lettered city remains unchanged as it is able to co-op the social groups
seeking to challenge it. However, for many contemporary critics, toward
the end of the twentieth century begins to emerge the notion of la ciu-
dad posletrada, a moment in which the Latin American writer has lost its
privileged position in part due to the social and cultural changes brought
about by mass media and globalization.
The gendering of space has been a long-time concern of feminist
criticism and, as we have seen, recent readings of women writers’ fic-
tional representations of urban space have brought a necessary cor-
rective view of the city in Latin American fiction. In some of these
readings, the notion of the lettered city plays a central role as it obvi-
ously designated of a group of (overwhelmingly male) scholars defend-
ing a patriarchal system.7 Guerrero and Anne Lambright explain that
“a careful reading of Rama’s work reveals the masculine nature of his
model of the lettered city, to the exclusion of women intellectuals, who
were still rare during the periods that Rama studies (first the colonial
era, and then the years of literary expansion following independence,
particularly from 1880 to 1920)” (2007, p. xix). Hence, as Schwartz
has noticed, the notion of the post-lettered city, so essential to the rela-
tionship between twenty-first century writers and their fictional rep-
resentation of the urban space, needs to take into account the impact of
women rewriting the city: “The concept of a post-lettered city, a social
space not just vaguely ‘beyond’ but more critically after the earlier func-
tioning of the written, stretches Rama’s work on urban elite cultural
space in the broadest contemporary perspective, where women’s writ-
ing, not only their resistance, their orality, or their sexuality, can play
6 J. E. GONZÁLEZ
a role… The feminine and feminist voice is an essential avenue of this

expansion, serving to reassess the power dynamic where earlier consid-
erations of urban hegemony ignored women’s experience and inscrip-
tion” (2007, p. 14).8 As Eduard Arriaga’s chapter in our book shows,
moving away from the old theories of the Latin American city created
by Rama and Romero, is one of the steps that marks this generation of
critics interested in urban space. But also contemporary Latin American
authors, one must conclude, find themselves with a greater awareness
of the historical and problematic relationship between their creative
medium and social power, between writing and the gendering of space.
The “post-lettered city” is, therefore, one of the first factors that needs
to be mentioned in the fictional depiction of Latin American urban
space in the twenty-first century.
However, it is important to remember that, for a book that is often
invoked in discussions about urban space and literature, Rama’s analysis
of the relationship between city and the act of writing (i.e., the prestige
that traditionally comes from being associated with being an intellec-
tual) is not about artistic representations of the city; in other words, it
is not a study about how the city is depicted in artistic writing. Reading
Rama will not give us an idea of how the Latin American city has phys-
ically (or spatially) changed throughout history—an important aspect,
if not the most important, if we are going to look for the social con-
struction of space—but how the justification for the privileging of writ-
ing has changed. The Lettered City is less about the urban landscape than
about the city as metaphor for a center of power whose rules are always
changing. Thus the adjectives attached to city in Rama’s chapter titles
(la ciudad ordenada, modernizada, revolucionada, and so on) do not
describe stages of the urban but the status of lettered elite’s relationship
to power. While the notion of la ciudad posletrada helps us understand
the current self-perception of the Latin American writers as intellectuals,
which is clearly different than how twentieth century authors saw them-
selves, it does not help when it comes to differentiating how the actual
Latin American city and/or its representation appears in the fiction of
the twenty-first century. For that, in addition to post-lettered, one must
investigate two other adjectives usually employed to describe the cit-
ies depicted in contemporary Latin American fiction: postmodern and
neoliberal.
One of the previously mentioned main sources of influence for the

Spatial Turn, Soja’s study of the late twentieth century urban space in
the United States, also contained one of the first comprehensive descrip-
tions of the postmodern city. The last section of his book famously
focused on Los Angeles as the paradigmatic postmodern city. For Soja,
Los Angeles is a city with a post-Fordist (as in shifting away from mass
production) landscape, composed of many centers, some of them resem-
bling small technopolises with high-technology industries and amal-
gamated around them “the new silicon landscapes: high-income and
expensively-packaged residential developments; huge regional shopping
centers reputed among the largest in the world; created and programmed
environments for leisure and entertainment (epitomized by Disneyland
in Anaheim) …several enclaves of cheap and manipulable labour con-
stantly replenished by immigration of both foreign workers and those
deindustrialized out of higher paying jobs” (1989, p. 212). While it is a
“global city” with a heterogeneous population, it is also a space in which
cultural and ethnic differences are compartmentalized, a city that has
become increasingly more difficult to govern. In the postmodern city,
Varma has commented, the idea of public spaces has disappeared as the
neo-liberal order “has engulfed and privatized the entire globe in one
form or another” (2011, p. 6).
Many descriptions of contemporary Latin American cities, especially
megalopolises like Buenos Aires, Mexico, or Lima share aspects with Los
Angeles. Latin American cultural critics tend to emphasize an apocalyptic
tone in their views of the contemporary cityscape. Take for example well-
known intellectual Beatriz Sarlo’s comments about present-day Buenos
Aires. Her 2008 description of the effect of neoliberalism, even if tinged
with a certain dangerous nostalgia for the past, is emblematic of the cur-
rent perception of the Latin American city: spaces now in “ruins” as a
result of the impact of globalization.
During the first part of the twentieth century, government and civil society
strove to create a city where the urban infrastructure, the parks, schools,
hospitals, and banks, the transportation and commercial centers, would be
evenly distributed around its territory. As a result, Buenos Aires was a rela-
tively successful and democratic city. Things have changed in the last three
decades and especially in the last few years. Buenos Aires is now a broken
city: radiant in the northern neighborhoods, where tourists find a replica
8 J. E. GONZÁLEZ
of globalized services and shops in an environment beautified by parks

built in the early twentieth century; filthy and deteriorated in the southern
areas, where no important public investments have compensated for the
indifference of global capitalism toward the city as a social and urban total-
ity… The concept of public space is losing its grip on the collective imag-
inary. Developers are redesigning the city against a republican tradition
that ascribed positive values to public spaces … dividing great extensions of
land into private neighborhoods, country clubs surrounded by electrified
fences, and massive shopping malls. (2008, pp. 43–47)
Geographical and sociological approaches to the urban space in Latin

America offer a similar view of the situation. Emphasizing the impact that
neoliberalism has had on the social formations in the region, these studies
also concur on the present-day fragmentation and privatization of the urban
space. “Many forms of public space have become undesirable or ‘residual,’
as privatization processes create new spaces of exclusion,” explain Jaffe and
Aguiar, “with residential, work and consumption facilities ordered by class
and ethnicity. Elites and the middle-class, sometimes even the poor, retreat
into gated communities and fortified enclaves, resulting in increased socio-
spatial fragmentation” (2012, p. 155). Seeing the cities as the space where
the effect of global neoliberal policies becomes visible, especially in relation
to issues of governance, these researchers tend to point out the feelings of
insecurity of the citizens and the increasing crime rate and acts of violence,
on the one hand, and the extreme, repressive measures to which the state is
resorting as a solution to controlling crime, on the other (Humphrey 2012,
p. 101). This is a different type of violence than what was experienced in
the pre-neoliberal era. “During the decades of the civil war and dictator-
ships, from the 1960s to the 1980s,” write Kees Koonings and Dirk Kruijt,
“violence was mostly political, instigated on behalf of the state by military
forces, paramilitary units, and police forces and policing extensions” (2015,
p. 3). The new, mainly urban violence is the result of crimes, of gang activ-
ity and of repressive policing targeting the poor to protect the urban rich
in the name of citizen security (Humphrey 2012, p. 102). For Koonings
and Kruijt the origin of the region’s urban violence and insecurity is to be
found in “persistent social exclusion and possibilities for alternative extra-
legal sources of income and power, combined with an absent, corrupt or
failing state” (2015, p. 5). One of the defining characteristics of the city in
this period is what Humphrey calls the lack of “public confidence in demo-
cratic governance, the rule of law and justice” (2012, p. 101).
One could then summarize the overall image of the Latin American
postmodern-neoliberal city as resulting from: a sociospatial fragmen-
tation based on class and racial status, an increasing income gap gener-
ated by the new economy, the presence of a new type of violence, lack of
confidence in the nation-state, and a general sense of decay and loss of
control. The characteristics just described, though not all of them pres-
ent in all the texts, find an echo in the fictions and topics studied in our
volume. They suggest a pessimistic view about the urban scene in which
the characters of these fictions navigate. For example, Eduard Arriaga’s
reading of Antonio José Ponte’s representation of Havana’s urban ruins
connects it to the situation of the Cuban capital as a “globalized colo-
nial city” and explains how for the author “citizens become part of those
ruins” as a result of the global capitalist market. Both Regalado-López
and François interpret the apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic images of
Mexico so common in turn of the century literature as reflecting the
growing concern for the overpopulation, violence, poverty, and all the
aspects that make the megalopolis uninhabitable. Evaluating the apoc-
alyptic representation of the city in novels published by Crack writers,
Regalado-López situates them within “the atmosphere of skepticism,
deception, and hopelessness associated with the burial of utopias and
with the Mexican crisis in the mid-nineties.” Juan Pablo Melo’s studies
Bolaño’s fragmentation of space and time as resulting from his attitude
toward global capitalism, which “ultimately tend[s] to disorder, chaos,
and destruction.” Perkowska emphasizes the civil war, the inability of the
local political situation to improve the conditions of living, and the ram-
pant corruption as some of the factors creating the sense of destruction
that permeates Franz Galich’s depiction of Managua.
In a sense, one could argue that our analyses continue a critical tra-
dition that sees narrative writing from a specific literary period—in this
case, twenty-first century Latin American fiction—as responding in their
structure to the social and material evolution of the city, while perhaps
announcing the end of such tradition. An excellent example of this clas-
sical way of reading the city is Richard Lehan’s The City in Literature
(1998). This critic sees in the emergence of the capitalist system the
most important force in creating the modern urban world, explaining
that it transformed the medieval-renaissance world, moving it “from
a feudal to an urban base, as the cities of Europe became the money
capitals under the influence of the new middle-class merchant, traders,
10 J. E. GONZÁLEZ
and speculators” (1998, p. 32). Strangely, he uses Robinson Crusoe, a

tale of a man isolated from civilization, to argue that Defoe anticipates
the rise of the commercial city and “the Enlightenment mentality that
became the basis for the modern city” (1998, p. 30). In Lehan’s view,
the Enlightenment’s important role came from an emphasis on rea-
son that “eventually led to a system of laws that explained nature and
was suited to the commercial and later an industrial exploitation that
created new forms of wealth” (1998, p. 30). From that moment on,
Lehan’s critical narrative reads the history of literature in conjunction
with an increasing use of technology and maximization of profit that has
changed the modern urban space: In Dickens’ works, he sees a move-
ment from the human to the inhuman as technology transforms the
cityscape (“the city as using up the land and creating a wasteland, a sys-
tem of physical debris and human dereliction” [Lehan 1998, p. 41]); In
Zola’s fictions, a double view that is, on the one hand, pessimistic about
the fate of the urban individual and, on the other, optimistic about the
evolutionary march toward perfection; in Balzac’s novels, the creation
of new “human types” and a questioning of the Enlightenment legacy.
And, of course, there is also modernism. If there is a movement that
bolsters the case for juxtaposing literary history and urban change is
Anglo-European modernism. No definition of the movement appears to
be complete without taking into consideration the connection between
modern literary techniques and the representation of the city. Is it pos-
sible to talk about modernism and not mention how Joyce’s innovative
literary techniques enhance his depiction of Dublin?—Lehan devotes an
entire chapter to it, titled “Joycity.” The city of modernism is usually
described as complex, fragmented, constantly changing; a place where
the individual gets lost in a mass society. In a very traditional reading
of modernism, Lehan argues that during this period the urban world
and its commercial and industrial reality became hostile: “Under such
pressure the city as a physical place gave way to the city as a state of
mind… As the modern city became more complex, reading it became
more difficult. Part of the problem stemmed from the modernist belief
that the self was anchored only in consciousness … The self became a
bundle of sensory impressions precariously grouped together, its reality
constantly threatened with dissolution” (1998, p. 77). The modernist
inward turn made possible the use of myths and symbols to understand
the city, whose complexity made it impossible for modern subjects to
create an image of it.
From the standpoint of Latin American literary history, the assump-

tion of literary styles changing according or in reaction to the social and
technological changes brought about by a linear urban development is
obviously problematic (What is the function of nineteenth century nat-
uralism in less developed capitalist urban spaces?). But to understand
the strong impact that this conception of literary history had in shap-
ing the modern Latin American novel, let us briefly take a look at Alejo
Carpentier’s early reflections on urban space in “Problemática actual de
la novela latinoamericana.” Written around 1963, the essay seeks to pro-
mote the art of depicting the city as a response to the problem of creat-
ing original literature in Latin America. Complaining that Latin American
novelists wishing to faithfully portray the region’s culture have been una-
ble to write but “novelas nativistas [que] eran ecos de otras cosas que ya
habían sonado en el Viejo Continente” (1987, p. 9), and influenced by
the apparent correlation between modernist style and the urban landscape
in Anglo-European novels, Carpentier asserts that “la gran tarea del nov-
elista americano está en inscribir la fisonomía de sus ciudades en la liter-
atura universal, olvidándose de tipicismos y costumbrismos … Hay que
fijar la fisonomía de las ciudades como fijó Joyce la de Dublín” (1987, p.
11). The only problem with his own proposal, the Cuban author com-
plains, is that while cities such as Venice, Paris or Rome have a “style”
fixed in time, “La gran dificultad de utilizar nuestras ciudades como esce-
narios de novelas está en que nuestras ciudades no tienen estilo. Más o
menos extensas, más o menos gratas, son un amasijo, un arlequín de cosas
buenas y cosas detestables—remedos horrendos, a veces, de ocurrencias
arquitectónicas … En el Vedado de La Habana… se entremezclan todos
los estilos imaginables: falso helénico, falso romano, falso Renacimiento”
(1987, p. 12). Carpentier then makes an original argument: having no
style is the style of Latin American cities. Eventually, he says, things that
are initially thought to have no style or that challenge classical notions
of style, are recognized as having their own unique style: “No estilos
serenos o clásicos [sino] una nueva disposición de elementos, de texturas,
de fealdades embellecidas por acercamientos fortuitos, de encrespamien-
tos y metáforas, de alusiones de cosas a ‘otras cosas,’ que son, en suma, la
fuente de todos los barroquismos conocidos” (1987, p. 14). Carpentier
is going to famously explain later on in this essay that Latin American art
has always been baroque, “[un] barroquismo creado por la necesidad de
nombrar las cosas [latinoamericanas] aunque con ello nos alejemos de las
técnicas en boga” (1987, p. 26), and he declares that the only legitimate
12 J. E. GONZÁLEZ
style for the Latin American novelist is the Baroque. Carpentier’s elegant
argument is however still trapped within the logic of Anglo-European
literary history. It is because Joyce’s modern style has been frequently
explained as a reflection of the modern city life that Carpentier feels that
Latin American writers will only produce great novels once they start
writing about their urban reality. On the one hand, in recognizing the
synchronicity of diverse stylistic periods that shape the Latin American
city, Carpentier appears to understand the origin of those urban charac-
teristics in a situation of economic and cultural marginality. On the hand,
however, his solution to the “problem” reinforces a specifically Anglo-
European version of literary history in which styles evolve from changes
in the urban landscape. Carpentier’s theory about a link between style,
urban space and local or regional identity was not a unique response, but
probably a generational characteristic. Holmes has argued that “through
experimentation in narrative structure, linguistic variation, and neologism,
characteristic of Boom literature, [Boom novels] generate images of the
of Spanish American urban environment as at once vertiginous, exhila-
rating, unfathomable, inspirational, and exemplary of Spanish American
cultural identity” (2007, p. 28). The time to use descriptions of Latin
American cities in an attempt to capture some kind of essence of a local
cultural identity, however, is long gone. Nothing seems farther from Latin
American writers’ minds than to develop a style out of their desire to
register an “authentic” or “essential” Latin American urban reality. It is
true that in Carpentier’s comments about the Latin American city there
is a recognition of their marginality (“falso helénico, falso romano, falso
Renacimiento”), but that gesture pales in comparison to the twenty-first
Latin American author’s awareness of globalization as responsible for the
features and ruins of their cities, which is very palpable in the narrations
studied in this volume. Under the conditions of globalization, it is hard
to see the features of the Latin American cities as anything other than
responses to international economic and cultural trends.
Some have interpreted features of postmodern literature within the
logic of the “urban change as literary style” version of literary history
that Carpentier espoused. For example, having followed, in his 1998
book, the traditional account that links the modern city and modernist
literature, Lehan’s view of the postmodern city, sees the postmodern rep-
resentation of urban space as reflecting the complex economic system of
late capitalism, “the money system has become so complex that it should
be thought of as more of a self-enclosed, self-energizing system than
as anything material” (1998, p. 273) and, as a consequence, a “human
imperative” that one could still detect in modernism has disappeared in

the postmodern period: “As postmodernists drain consciousness from
both the subject and the urban world, the self is commodified along with
other objects; what is human becomes virtually refined away” (1998, p.
274). Lehan’s view, as expected, is a summary of the main characteris-
tics that began to be associated with postructuralism and its rejection of
modernist meta-narratives: “Without a transcendental signifier, urban
signs begin to float, and meaning gives way to mystery … We are left
with a sense of diminished humanity, of the anonymous and superflu-
ous human isolation and fragility, of anxiety and great nervous tension.
Lacking transcendence, the city cannot go beyond what it consumes”
(1998, pp. 265–266). And more recent readings do not differ greatly
in their appreciation of the literary postmodern city. In the 2014 edited
collection, The Cambridge Companion to the City in Literature, Nick
Bentley’s chapter on the postmodern city uses the opening sequences
of Ridley Scott’s film, Blade Runner, to exemplify the new urban real-
ity. In the film’s representation of the postmodern city, he explains, we
have both the “towering and technological splendor” of late capitalism
alongside street scenes that reveal an “overcrowded, Babelish populace”
(2014, p. 175). While Bentley observes the negative and violent effects
of global capitalism on ordinary citizens, the emphasis of his definition of
the postmodern urban is on consumerism, on the “dehumanizing effects
of hyper-urban living,” on rapid technological change and the culture
of surveillance, among other things (2014, pp. 175–177). The actual
material effect of the economic reality remains in the background, while
the “psychological effects of consumer-led, metropolitan living” (2014,
p. 178) take center stage in his reading of contemporary fiction.
The contrast with some of the narratives studied in our collection could
not be more dramatic: Latin American representations of their postmod-
ern, neoliberal cities do not appear to be as focused on the dehumaniz-
ing effects of consumerism and the dizzying effect of the abstract global
capitalism as they are on what Blade Runner banishes to the background
while it considers the question of the postmodern subject. This does
not mean that Latin American fiction is not concerned with universal
philosophical and aesthetic problems. However, as it is evident that the
centers of transnational capital are located elsewhere than in the Latin
American cities, these narratives cannot pretend that their cities are exam-
ples of hyper-human living in a post-human world. In some—not all—
contemporary Latin American narratives the background of cyberpunk
fiction becomes the foreground. But there are also other paths that can be
14 J. E. GONZÁLEZ
taken. When the Latin American author adopts a post-national perspec-

tive, or if he or she is forced into the position of a tourist (see Malagón’s
analysis of Gamboa’s China) or artificially adopts it, as Timothy R.
Robbins shows in his analysis of Fresán’s novels, other elements come to
the foreground and more typical postmodern games are possible.
The contemporary vision of the Latin American urban space is not all
dark. Several of the articles in our collection emphasize the Utopian possi-
bilities found in contemporary fiction, the possibility of creating a different
urban space, of finding a way to countermeasure the effects of neolib-
eralism and globalization. Such an attitude responds to an aspect of the
postmodern city that had already been identified in the earliest definitions
of the postmodern urban space. In his analysis of Los Angeles, Soja men-
tioned that a few successful acts of resistance to the neoliberal restructur-
ing of life could be found in urban social movements “organized around
housing issues,” as in the case of the City of Santa Monica, which “for
a fleeting moment … teetered on the verge of ‘municipal socialism’ as a
progressive city council was elected by an aroused majority of renters bent
on imposing rent controls” (1989, p. 220). Soja, however, was ultimately
pessimistic about the possibility of urban movements challenging the new
order. In Latin America, while the current economic period has increased
the fear of violence and sense of insecurity, many scholars have noticed
that there is also an alternative, positive version of the city in which neo-
liberal urban changes are contested and it thus becomes possible to find
“spaces of hopes, where political, ethnic and sexual minorities can find
new resources for mobilization and emancipation” (Jaffe and Aguiar 2012,
p. 155). Vulnerable urban populations have learned to employ strategies
to counter neoliberal urbanism creating social movements, emphasizing
good urban governance, mobilizing resources. Likewise, in contempo-
rary Latin American fiction, these spaces of hopes manifest themselves in
narrative features, as several of the critics in our collection have noticed.
In her study of the narrations about the Metro, Francois explains that the
underground “functions as a locus for the recuperation of bodily experi-
ence, of social contact, and of aesthetic inspiration” as the characters of
these texts embrace the chaotic aspects of this space. When in Faces in the
Crowd Valeria Luiselli is describing the impossible encounters between the
contemporary narrator and the little known Harlem Renaissance Mexican
poet Gilberto Owen, “the chronological impossibility” of the interac-
tion seems to have an ulterior motive. “Although these encounters are
never direct,” explains Raynor, “they establish a type of camaraderie and
community between the two wandering expatriate Mexican writers.” In

Sierra’s study of two contemporary Argentinean writers, the supernatu-
ral serves as a way of showing the relations of domination and the polit-
ical truth underneath the order of the city, subverting the order of the
nation-state. Not always the “spaces of hope” triumph and some of the
contributors to our volume, like Soja in his study, also warn us against too
optimistic interpretations of these representations of the urban. However,
one can definitely mark these utopian impulses as a sign of our way of con-
ceiving space in our times, when the awareness of the constructed nature
of space generates a desire to challenge those who control it.
Notes
1. We have presented a general description of this generation of writers and
some of the features that separates them from the Boom writers in the
introduction to New Trends in Contemporary Latin American Narrative
(González and Robbins 2014).
2. For a definition of the term see the Introduction to Warf and Arias’ The
Spatial Turn (2008). For overall view of many of the directions in which the
study of space—not limited to urban space—in literature is being taken, see
Tally’s chapter “The Reassertion of Space in Literary Studies” (2017: 1–6).
3. Foucault’s main essays on space are “Of Other Spaces: Utopias and
Heterotopias” and his “Questions on Geography.” On Foucault and space,
see also Crampton and Elden’s edited volume (2012). Elden also offers
a good introduction to Lefebvre’s ideas about space in his Understanding
Henri Lefebvre (2004).
4. See also Wesphal’s comments in Geocriticism (2011, pp. 90–94).
5. Among some of the great contributions in Latin America, see Marta
López’s 1996 essay “Ciudad y desencuentro” (1996). Another work from
this period worth mentioning is Mabel Moraña’s edited volume, Espacio
Urbano (2002).
6. Rama’s theory is analyzed in Holmes (2007, pp. 18–19), Schwartz’s first
chapter (1999) and, as already mentioned, Guerrero and Lambright’s
introduction to their edited volume.
7. See comments by Rama’s translator about the lettered city (Lambright and
Guerrero 2007, p. xix).
8. However, one should also notice that the emphasis on the post-lettered
city condition might also result on a limited critique of Rama. The fact
that Rama’s views on other subjects—his definition of the Boom period—
has been similarly criticized in the past, for example, should alert us to the
possibility that the theory of the lettered city possess inaccuracies, gaps and
16 J. E. GONZÁLEZ
problems that are being ignored. In our desire to move beyond the restric-
tive nature of the lettered city, one should be careful not to legitimize it
in the process. One runs the risk of naturalizing Rama’s reading by focus-
ing only on the fact that the lettered city has crumbled. Instead, it is also
important to question the validity of his theory, to question whether the
lettered city was as powerful as he said it was to begin with. It is important
to go back to the periods in which the lettered city was supposedly domi-
nant and study how women, for example, challenged and modified existing
notions of space. For examples of these approaches, see Ángel A. Rivera’s
essay on Carmela Eulate Sanjurjo, a Puerto Rican writer whose turn of
the century novels “not only represent nineteenth-century Caribbean and
Spanish women within the context of the city, they also explore the kind of
intellectual endeavors that would allow female writers to express or to con-
struct their subjectivities” (Lambright and Guerrero 2007, pp. 209–210).
Also, see Marta Sierra’s chapter on Victoria Ocampo and Norah Lange
during the 1920–1950 period (2012, pp. 21–62). In the present volume,
see Eduard Arriaga’s comments about Rama.
Bibliography
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the City in Literature, edited by Kevin R. McNamara, 175–187. New York:
Cambridge University Press.
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Draper, Susan. 2003. “Cartografías de una ciudad posletrada: La República de
Platón (Uruguay, 1993–1995).” Revista Iberoamericana 69, no. 202: 31–49.
Elden, Stuart, and Jeremy W. Crampton. 2012. Space, Knowledge and Power:
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Tradition and New Writing in Latin America.” In New Trends in
Contemporary Latin American Narrative, edited by Timothy R. Robbins and
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Kruijt, 1–29. London: Zed Books.
Lambright, Anne, and Elisabeth Guerrero. 2007. “Introduction.” In Unfolding
the City: Women Write the City in Latin America, edited by Anne Lambright
and Elisabeth Guerrero, ix–xxxii. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
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López, Marta. 1996. “Ciudad y desencuentro: dos miradas de mujer.” In Pensar
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Bogotá: Tercer Mundo Editores.
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Latina. Pittsburgh: Instituto Internacional de Literatura Iberoamericana.
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New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
CHAPTER 2
Beyond the Ruins of the Organized City:

Urban Experiences Through the Metro
in Contemporary Mexican Literature
Liesbeth François
When talking about Mexico City in the present tense, and about its lit-
erary representation in particular, sooner rather than later the words
“chaos,” “disorder” or even “monstrosity” will enter the conversa-
tion. One of the most famous expressions of this tendency is Carlos
Monsiváis’s characterization of the Mexican capital as a “post-apoca-
lyptic city,” a city where “Lo peor ya ocurrió (y lo peor es la población
monstruosa cuyo crecimiento nada detiene)” (2001, p. 21). The same
idea informs a large strain of thinking that can be found in theoretical
works on urbanism and the cultural products referring to it—the title of
Diane Davis’s study of the city, Urban Leviathan, or of the first chap-
ter of Lucía Sá’s research into the cultural representations of Mexico
City and São Paulo, “Approaching the Monster” (2007) are only two
other telling examples. It does not come as a surprise, then, that many
literary descriptions of the last two to three decades appear closely
L. François (*) 
Faculty of Arts, French, Italian and Spanish Literature,
KU Leuven, Louvain, Belgium

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-92438-0_2
20 L. FRANÇOIS
associated with this “post-apocalyptical” vein, predominantly through

the representation of violence, poverty, overpopulation or ecological dis-
aster. Writers such as Homero Aridjis, Sandro Cohen and Paco Ignacio
Taibo II, among many others, have evoked the highly dystopic images
of a Mexico City which will be unlivable in the future.1 The representa-
tions of the Mexican capital, in this context, enter in conflict with the
ideals of order and coherence that were at the basis of the conception of
most Latin American metropolises, and that were imposed and policed
by those elites whom Ángel Rama famously called “the lettered city”
(Holme 2007, pp. 15–19; Heffes 2008, pp. 25–90).
What has less often been remarked is the fact that the perception of
chaos and disorder is, paradoxically, largely dependent on the very same
ideals of urban planning that from the start have been fundamental to
the vision of those powerful intellectuals that took part in the “lettered
city.” Putting his finger on the sore spot, Peter Krieger questions the
omnipresence of the apocalyptic imaginary of Mexico City:
Mexico City, in the early twenty-first century, is a megalopolis of about

twenty million inhabitants where cultural fragments of its pre-Hispanic
past, the colonial period, and the modern epoch have left their visual
traces. The city thus constitutes a vital, albeit sometimes clashing cross-cul-
tural collage. Yet, the perception and evaluation of this megacity are bound
up with ideological filters which produce a facile picture of a catastrophic
city. (2012, p. 56).
The chaotic image of the city relies, indeed, on the presupposition

that it should be ordered in the first place: the ideological filters men-
tioned by Krieger, in this sense, are molded by the same imaginations
of an ideal, rationally planned city that is presented as definitively out
of reach. Similarly, Mark Anderson (2016) has noted, from an ecocriti-
cal perspective, the complicity of apocalyptic imaginaries with the same
worldview that has led to the problems they are themselves based on.
Apocalypsis, in this sense, is a narrative that is the negation of mod-
ernization seen through the lens of modernization, observed through
the lens of progress that has come to an end. As Anderson makes
clear, it does not offer solutions, but only designates and enhances the
same source of frustrations that it perceives in the modern city (2016,
pp. 103–104). Although environmental disaster is a possible scenario
that is based on very real problems, its representation in literary terms
2 BEYOND THE RUINS OF THE ORGANIZED CITY … 21
as a mere source of insurmountability and doom impedes, according to

Anderson, actual steps toward a better alternative. On the contrary, their
representation as apocalyptic circumstances is complicit and even favora-
ble to a mental image of order that is equally problematic—oppressive,
exclusionary, etcetera—as the chaos that is being criticized.
As Néstor García Canclini has shown in his work on “urban imaginar-
ies,” there is always a part of the relationship that we establish with the
urban landscapes that is constituted by our experiences and our mem-
ories, but more importantly by our values and beliefs, be they political,
social and/or religious (1997, pp. 88–97). When we see a city as “lack-
ing order,” we are, mostly unconsciously, imposing a normative vision
that is far from neutral: it is a vision created and spread, in the case of
Latin America, first by colonizers who saw the ordered city as an ideal
that would justify their conquests and imperial power, later by govern-
ments who sought to manage, alter and develop the capital as the heart
and epitome of the nation, and more recently by the new economic elites
whose interests lay in modernization and rationalization as necessary cir-
cumstances to enhance benefits. To talk about a chaotic city, then, is to
validate, often through a nostalgic perspective, a fictional construct that
owes its very existence to the need to justify power and domination: a
previous or utopic, better, but irremediably lost order. Of course, not all
of the representations in terms of chaos limit themselves to merely prob-
lematizing the growth of the city—Carlos Monsiváis himself explores the
paradox of “rituals of chaos,” in which the chaotic itself becomes a con-
dition for social experience and identification—but those that get past
the old order/disorder binary without reinforcing stereotypes and social
expectations that can and should be thoroughly questioned, continue to
be relatively scarce.
The idea of a city that “spills over” or “tears apart at the seams” in
comparison with an older, urban center, is, of course, not new, and has
generated diverse responses throughout history. During the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries, the topics of demographic explosions and of
modernization are key to an abundant production of urban literature.
On the one hand, there certainly has been a lot of enthusiasm toward
the modifications of the cityscape, which modernized and diversified the
stimuli for literary creation.2 A central literary figure that appears in this
context is, without any doubt, that of the flâneur, which has been the-
orized by Charles Baudelaire, Honoré de Balzac and Walter Benjamin
22 L. FRANÇOIS
among many others, but has appeared largely beyond the boundaries
of France and French literature. On the other hand, an anxiety about
the dehumanizing and disorienting effects of modern metropolises has
progressively tempered this enthusiasm. From the nineteenth century
onwards, philosophical reflection and observation lead to the conclu-
sion that the city had become “overwhelming” or even “hostile” to
individuals.3 This way, it is clear that the impression of incommensura-
bility and chaos are neither limited to Mexico City nor to the last two
decades. What is more, the historical optimistic responses to the growth
of the metropolis provide a possible antecedent for overcoming the
abovementioned order/disorder binary, which is strictly bound up with
the latter vision of the city as ungraspable. In this sense, the flâneur has
resurfaced as a way to explore the fragmented heterogeneity of the city
without necessarily imposing an ideological categorization in terms of its
(non-)conformity to the organized and the rational. Peter Krieger uses
the Citámbulos project, a website where the pictures and impressions of
several urban walkers are gathered, as an example of a way to avoid fall-
ing into the chaotic stereotype. In a similar way, Vicente Quirarte, whose
Elogio de las calles is one of the foremost panoramic works on the liter-
ary representation of Mexico City until the end of the twentieth century,
proposes in his characteristically lyrical style to “modify the disaster” by
recovering those elements that are witnesses of the city’s past and of its
many attractions (2001, p. 596). His account of Mexico City literature,
while recognizing the existing problems of chaos and expansion, refuses
to limit itself to the exclusive treatment of these problems, and several
modern-day urban crónicas can be said to attempt to do the same. And
within the narrative and poetic genres, works such as Y retiemble en sus
centros la tierra (1999) by Gonzalo Celorio, Papeles falsos (2010) by
Valeria Luiselli and Luigi Amara’s A pie (2010) are just a few examples
of how a flâneur-like perspective on the megacity can be used to reach a
point beyond either critique of chaos or blindness toward the daily reali-
ties of the urban landscape.4
The purpose of this article, however, is to explore a more unexpected
way of escaping the dead end of the city’s conceptualization in terms
of order and disorder: the one of visiting the Metro. Several texts writ-
ten by contemporary Mexican authors choose this space as their back-
ground, which in fact becomes very much a foreground, and connect it
to alternative experiences of the Mexican capital. These works, initially,
adopt the normative gaze that sees the city as a place where order should
reign so as to, later, deconstruct this perspective and liberate a kind of

non-formatted, experiential impulse, through which bodily and aesthetic
experience can be narrated. In particular, these points will be demon-
strated through a more detailed analysis of two literary “works”: the
novel El huésped (The Host) by Guadalupe Nettel, and a sequence that
appears in several books and short stories by Mario Bellatin, in which a
character goes to the Metro in order to receive a massage. These works
establish, in choosing the Metro as their setting, a dialogue with the
social and cultural connotations of this space. As the opposite of the
rational, planned city, the literary imagination of the subway is structured
by the strong symbolical and cultural imaginaries that are connected to
it, and that resonate with hellish imaginations of the subsoil as well as
with narratives of progress and technological development that use the
subway as a symbol of domination of natural forces. Therefore, before
delving into the analysis of the texts in question, it is necessary to take a
closer look at what can be called “underground imaginaries” in a histori-
cal, literary and theoretical sense.
Underground Imaginaries and Their Uses

A long religious and mythological history has imagined what is below
the surface as the place of the dead, the location of hell, and informs a
cultural imaginary that is, even without its religious connotations, still
vigorous today. The subsoil functions as the primary location associated
with death and loss, in the shape of the underworld of shades of Greco-
Roman civilization, of Christian hell, and of the Aztec underground tra-
jectory that the dead were supposed to follow, to name just the three
most important references in the case of Mexican culture. Literary imag-
ination has, of course, largely resonated with these cultural imaginar-
ies. Through Greek and Roman myths, through Dante’s version of the
Christian hell or through the mythical space of the Aztec underworld
Mictlán, these hellish figurations have acquired narrative forms and have,
in so doing, shaped ideological understanding of society. These imag-
inaries did not wane when a more laical, “modern” society was in the
making: as shown by David Pike in the case of London and Paris, “[a]
s dumping ground of the West, the metaphorical confines of today’s
underground contain the tangled remains of Hell, of nineteenth-century
Paris and London, of the modernist city, and of the two world wars”
(2007, p. 10). In the case of the subway, Marc Augé has shown that
24 L. FRANÇOIS
the historical and symbolic connotations of the underground have often

remained literally vigorous (1986). The Mexican Metro is no exception:
as Juan Villoro notes, the symbols used for many of the stations refer
to the city’s pre-Columbian heritage (2004, pp. 130–131). At the same
time, the hellish imaginaries of the underground, although not entirely
linked yet to a religious or theological truth, are also present on a more
intuitive level, where they continue to inspire a sense of anguish, inacces-
sibility and irrationality. What is below the ground, as Gaston Bachelard
(1997, pp. 50–56) mentions regarding the poetic connotations of the
cellar, has become associated psychologically but also artistically to the
irrational, the primitive and the oneiric. The anguish, in the case of
the underground, often takes the shape of the fear of disorder and con-
finement—the Metro produces, as Carlos Monsiváis would have it, “el
caos en una cáscara de nuez” (2001, p. 111).
On the other hand, myths of progress and evolution have taken the
mastery of the subsoil precisely as one of the flagships of man’s capac-
ity to intervene in nature and to construct his own tailor-made real-
ity. As Rosalind Williams has demonstrated in her study Notes on the
Underground, underground projects started to appear in literature and
other arts from the eighteenth century onwards as laboratories for and
barometers of political and social changes: the construction of artificial
environments below the earth proved to be a productive way to raise
questions about the way in which humans relate not only to nature, but
also to each other. Although not included in Williams’s study, the case
of Mexico City occupies a special place in these kinds of imaginations.
According to Peter Krieger, the control of the subsoil has functioned as a
central political metaphor in the case of the Mexican capital: “En toda la
historia de la urbe, el dominio de las fuerzas naturales sirvió como metá-
fora del poder político. Controlar la fluidez anárquica del agua, sobre
todo en México, donde hay frecuentes inundaciones, significó también
mandar sobre la población urbana y distribuirla en los espacios ordena-
dos de la ciudad; así, la tecnología moderna aplicada para canalizar las
aguas potables y negras simbolizó cambios sociales” (2006, p. 33). Juan
Villoro, in his crónica on the Mexican Metro, summarizes this point
strikingly: “We’ve run out of water and air, but the dynamic city keeps
growing. But where is it headed? All thumbs point downward. Mexico
City’s prime engineering projects have been underground ones: the sub-
ways and the drains. Our last frontier is underground” (2004, p. 127).
This way, it becomes clear that the underground constitutes, in the case
of Mexico City, a primary battlefield for the imposition of order in the

city, and for the control of everything that is deemed to be in opposition
with the vision of the rational, planned city. The underground, in this
sense, is the location where symbolic and cultural imaginaries of hell and
the irrational, on the one hand, and narratives of modernization and pro-
gress, on the other, can be confronted with each other, enter into con-
flict, or overlap in order to shed light on the functioning of the city and
the way in which it is experienced.
There is, however, a way in which representations of the under-
ground move away from these two opposites—from the irrational, cha-
otic imagination of the underground as well as from its conception as
the flagship of modernization, which are nothing more than two faces
of the same normative quest for urban order. In his aforementioned
article, Mark Anderson explores the possibility of overcoming precisely
the dead end to which apocalyptic thinking leads through an analysis
of crónicas that take place in the Metro of Mexico City (2016). Here
too, it becomes clear that representations of the Metro and the under-
ground, in general, maintain a strong connection with urban imaginaries
of chaos and control. Anderson argues that literary works that choose
the underground as their setting can help to counter the omnipresence
of narratives that underpin the image of chaos and disaster on the basis
of their inherent and implicit exigence of order. This is, of course, a pos-
sibility, and Anderson himself signals it as such: as we have mentioned
earlier, the underground, and the subway in particular, tend to be repre-
sented as much as urban hells as they are symbols of progress, and both
do not necessarily undermine the apocalyptic narrative. Yet, as Anderson
adduces, the representation of the underground is a possible correction
to what Eyal Weizman has described as the “flat discourse” (2002) of
modern geopolitics, the schematic abstraction of space that reduces it to
what should be divided, ordered, shaped by human intelligence.
Weizman’s “flat discourse” recalls the concept of “abstract space,”
which the French Marxist philosopher Henri Lefebvre elaborated in his
seminal work The Production of Space. “Abstract space” refers to the way
in which modern-day societies tend to create space as a medium that is
entirely subordinated to the logic and necessities of power and of cap-
italism. Although Weizman himself does not delve into the link with
Lefebvre’s theory, there are multiple points of contact between his cri-
tique of the abstraction of modern geopolitics and “abstract space,”
which is also “a fetishized space, reductive of differences; a space,
26 L. FRANÇOIS
secondly, that is fragmented, separating, disjunctive, a space that locates

specificities, places or localities, both in order to control them and in
order to make them negotiable; and a space, finally, that is hierarchical,
ranging from the lowliest places to the noblest, from the tabooed to the
sovereign” (Lefebvre 1991, p. 282, emphasis in original). The abstrac-
tion of modern geopolitics and its complicity with a cartographic perspec-
tive is a common theme in several philosophical and social approaches
to urban studies: it is manifest in Lefebvre’s writings on the city and on
space in general, but also in Michel de Certeau’s opposition between
the abstraction of the map and the lived, embodied and everyday expe-
rience of walking, to name just one more example. What is interesting
about the combination of Lefebvre’s spatial theory with Weizman’s and
Anderson’s remarks, however, is that they translate these problematics
into the domain of volume, and make clear that a fundamental condition
for recovering the space behind the abstraction is, precisely, its tangibility,
the conscience of its existence in more than two dimensions.
One way to break through this oppressive “abstract space” could be,
by consequence, the reconquest of dimensionality, the representation of
space as a medium where people live and move about rather than estab-
lish divisions and close themselves in. According to Anderson, “the work
of an ecological humanities becomes to restore to environments their full
dimensions” (2016, p. 104), and he endeavors to put this mission into
practice by analyzing “perspectives that reconceive Mexico City, viewing
it not through the flattening optics of modern planning and neoliberal
economics, but taking instead a volumetric perspective that at least hints
at the true complexity of the city’s intensely entangled and fluid geog-
raphies, as well as of the political alliances and ecological agency of the
myriad species that call it home” (2016, pp. 104–105). The need for the
representation of dimensionality is not, however, limited to an ecocriti-
cal perspective. As Lefebvre argues, abstract space does not only subor-
dinate nature to the logic of accumulation and rationality, but also the
body and human experience itself. Abstract space, in this sense, is a space
where the experiential, vivid dimension of space that the French philos-
opher designates as “representational space” is suppressed and reduced
to a bare minimum: the dominance of the abstract perspective, “in thrall
to both knowledge and power, leaves only the narrowest leeway to rep-
resentational spaces, which are limited to works, images and memories
whose content, whether sensory, sensual or sexual, is so far displaced that
it barely achieves symbolic force” (Lefebvre 1991, p. 50, emphasis in
original). In the end, this “abstract” conception of space is a particularly

estranging one that limits human existence to its supposed rationality—
yet again, the implicit “order” of the lettered city. From this perspective,
life is hellish if it is not organized according to functional and rational
arguments, and contemporary megacities tend to be represented as being
on the verge of total disaster.
In the narrative texts that I will analyze in this article, Anderson’s
ecological take on the volumetric and its necessity for environmental
consciousness is paralleled by an experiential and social exploration of
dimensionality. Through these narrations, the underground functions
as a locus for the recuperation of bodily experience, of social contact,
and of aesthetic inspiration. The characters of these texts embrace what
is normally depicted as “chaotic” and/or “repulsive,” while questioning
these categories altogether. The result, however, is never just an inver-
sion of perspectives: the texts go against the grain of normative views,
but do not blindly praise their opposites. They tend to leave intact the
foundational ambiguity that characterizes the experiences in the Metro
and refuse to confine them either to a laudatory or to a dystopic narra-
tive. Guadalupe Nettel’s El huésped (The Host) tells the story of a young
woman, Ana, who thinks she is possessed by a strange being which she
calls “La Cosa” (“The Thing”), and who is introduced to a group of
blind and handicapped beggars that operate in the Metro. As I will
argue, these contacts broaden Ana’s perspective on herself, her spatial
experience and her view of the city. Nettel’s story has a lot of elements
in common with a narrative sequence that appears in several works by
Mario Bellatin, where a character enters the Metro in order to receive a
massage by a blind man. Bellatin, who has made the recycling of his writ-
ing materials and the persistent recurrence of certain thematic and sty-
listic elements into one of the central characteristics of his poetics (Cote
Botero 2014, pp. 11–21), describes this sequence, among other exam-
ples, in Disecado, El libro uruguayo de los muertos, and Los cien libros de
Bellatin. The elements of this narrative configuration invariably link the
massage in the Metro to the way in which the character relates to the
urban landscape. I will base my analysis foremost on its appearance in
the short story “Giradores en torno a mi tumba” where it appears in its
most elaborated form. My reading and comparison of the representations
by these two authors, then, aims to demonstrate that these texts realize
a “volumetric” reading of the underground space of the Metro, which
enables, in turn, personal and literary experience.
28 L. FRANÇOIS
Blindness and the Underground:

Guadalupe Nettel’s El huésped
The protagonist of El huésped, Ana, narrates her life from her child-
hood until what can be understood to be her mid-twenties. The omi-
nous presence of her alter ego, the parasite whom she calls “La Cosa,”
complicates her youth by imposing strange habits and provoking sudden
attacks of violence. Ana even deems her “host” responsible for the death
of her brother Diego. After this tragic event, La Cosa withdraws to the
background, but Ana senses that this armistice is only temporary. At an
already adult age, she discovers that her internal double does not tol-
erate light, and she supposes that it must be blind. As a way to learn
more about blindness, and honoring the saying that one should know
one’s enemy before going into battle, she starts to work in an insti-
tute for the blind as a reader. There, she meets El Cacho, a lame vag-
abond who introduces her into a group of beggars that operate in the
Metro. From this point onwards, La Cosa starts to manifest itself again
from time to time, and Ana spends more and more time roaming the
streets and the subway stations. This way, she gets to know her quarter,
la colonia Roma, and Mexico City in general, in ways she had not known
before. She becomes more involved in the activities of the group, and
she participates in the execution of an act of resistance that implies, on
the night before elections, substituting the ballots with envelopes filled
with excrements. The action turns out badly, and Marisol, a girl with
whom Ana had teamed up, is arrested. After these events, and in doubt
about whether the group will accept her presence again, Ana continues
her explorations of the Metro, up until the point where she goes to see
El Cacho at his home. This encounter does not only confirm Marisol’s
death, but it also suggests a kind of reconciliation through a sexual
encounter between the two characters. The narration ends by what can
be read as the definitive arrival of La Cosa: “‘Por fin llegas’, dije en voz
baja, y por toda respuesta recibí un escalofrío. Durante varios minutos
La Cosa y yo escuchamos juntas el murmullo de los metros que iban y
venían, uno después de otro, pero siempre iguales, como un mismo tren
que regresa sin cesar” (Nettel 2006, p. 189).
As becomes clear from this description, the Metro receives a major
role in El huésped, and the way in which the protagonist experiences
Mexico City is significantly altered by her fascination for this space. The
initial relation between Ana and the city is highly molded by her social
background and certain ideological assumptions that are evident in her

way of expressing herself. Ana comes from an upper-middle-class family:
they live in a spacious house with a garden in la colonia Roma, which
is one of the more well-off quarters in Mexico City. Her perspective is
highly informed by prejudices of class: she cringes when someone uses
“tú” instead of the formal “usted” to talk to her, she shows that she has
no idea whatsoever of the circumstances in which some poor people live.
When Marisol shows her that the home of one of the beggars is a simple
plastic fabric suspended above the street, she replies with “¿A ti te parece
que se puede vivir en un hoyo así?” (Nettel 2006, p. 151, emphasis in
original) and she is disgusted by revolutionary music from Cuba, among
other examples.5 Ana describes La Cosa as her dark twin, who commits
acts of violence which she does not recall afterwards. The same fact that
she tends to forget these episodes, together with her narrow worldview,
however, signals to the reader that Ana is, in fact, a quite unreliable nar-
rator. Although she herself blames a lot of her behavior on La Cosa, it
becomes clear throughout the novel that Ana’s character is a particularly
difficult and antipathetic one. As Véronique Pitois Pallares has noted,
there are various moments in the narration where she rejects well-meant
signs of friendship and empathy, such as a visit from her pupils at the
institute when she is ill. Ana’s thorny character and its relation to her
social position is evident in her initial ambiguity toward the group of
beggars in the Metro: “Cuando estaba de humor para dialogar, le decía
[a El Cacho] que esa decadencia [de la ciudad] no tenía nada que ver
conmigo y que por mí les podía explotar el metro a todos. Él entonces
me miraba desconcertado—para mi gran satisfacción—sin saber si mi act-
itud era solamente deseo de provocarlo o si venía de lo más profundo de
mi condición burguesa” (Nettel 2006, p. 125). This way, while a first
impression tends to validate Ana’s point of view and the accompanying
stigmatization of La Cosa, a closer reading can even lead to the ques-
tion whether Ana herself is not the “monster.” Any reading of El huésped
should, by consequence, take into account the conflicting presence of
two different value systems at the level of the narration. Needless to say,
this also affects the way in which the city is perceived and lived through a
double lens, of which Ana’s side is granted the major amount of control
over the perspective.
Which characteristics can we ascribe to La Cosa, then, when we
take into account Ana’s manipulation of the narration? Adriana
30 L. FRANÇOIS
López-Labourdette has analyzed the novel as a narration that breaks

through a unitary conception of the self, and she has emphasized the
contrast between Ana’s permanent anguish and the sensation that is
described at the end of the novel when La Cosa finally takes power. As
can be seen in the already cited last sentences, these do not use terms of
disaster but instead create an impression of complicity and serenity. This
ending leads the reader to question the Manichean image that Ana has
created and diffused throughout her narration, and invites one to reread
several passages that prove to be more ambiguous and complex than they
appear at first sight. For instance, Ana describes the transformation she
undergoes physically in the following terms:
No era mi rostro ya, sino el del huésped. Mis manos crispadas, la forma
de caminar, reflejaban ahora una torpeza pastosa, la lentitud de quien ha
dormido muchas horas e intenta despabilarse de golpe. Al mismo tiempo,
descubría con asombro una sensualidad nueva. Mis caderas y mis pechos,
antes totalmente pueriles, eran cada vez más prominentes, como si los
dominara una voluntad ajena. Poco a poco, el territorio pasaba bajo su
control. (Nettel 2006, p. 124)
La Cosa, who even might be thought to exercise a limited control

about the narration in passages like these, manifests itself in this and
many other fragments as another version of the self that complements
Ana’s rational, bourgeois and distant perspective with what is left out:
it revalues bodily experience, sensuality and human contact. The theme
of blindness is key in this respect, as La Cosa, presumably blind, teaches
Ana to value her other senses. For instance, when Ana feels she is dom-
inated by La Cosa, she goes to the metro in order to sense the presence
of other people’s bodies, and the moment in which she has a sexual
encounter with El Cacho is a consequence of La Cosa’s rejection of
Ana’s asexuality and its vindication, in turn, of the body as a place of sen-
sations and pleasure. Although it is important to see Ana and her “par-
asite” not as two completely opposed poles (the complicity suggested
at the end contradicts this possibility), it can be said that each of them
emphasizes other aspects of life: Ana the more “rational,” visual, isolated
and “normative” outlook; La Cosa the sensual, the social and even “ani-
mal” side of human existence (López-Labourdette 2012, p. 160).
It is along these same lines that spatial experiences in El huésped are
developed. Ana’s view on the city is modeled by her obsessive refusal
of social contact, and it represents a normative perspective on space,

which should be ordered: divided and respected, rather than shared.
The most prominent example of this perspective is the institute in which
she works and where blind people receive help and support, but are also
very dependent and ultimately limited in their possibilities. The insti-
tute is designed to control, in a nearly Foucauldian way, those who are
considered as anomalies, and the strict regulations of the way in which
the interns can move about in the building—every space has its function
and should be used as such—leave them a very small to even nonexistent
margin of liberty: “¿Qué está haciendo ahí? Sabe perfectamente que el
jardín está prohibido” (Nettel 2006, p. 64). The group of beggars in the
metro, on the other hand, is organized precisely in order to provide an
alternative to this well-meant but ultimately paralyzing regime. As several
members of the organization comment throughout Ana’s encounters
with them, they want to find a way to live their life in freedom, without
being reduced to their handicap: “lo que buscaba ahí era la posibilidad
de vivir de manera autónoma, a pesar de la ceguera, sin la dependencia
que veía en los alumnos del instituto y que tanto me aterraba” (2006,
p. 114). The metro is the ideal laboratory for this experiment: it is a
space that is explicitly designed not to live in but to move about, which
entails less control and more liberty of movement. For these reasons,
according to one of the leaders of the group, the Metro is “one of the
best places to live in Mexico” (2006, p. 121).
Through the contacts with this group, Ana—or should we say “Ana
and La Cosa”?—starts to appreciate the benefits of spending time in
the subway. In particular, the protagonist begins to enjoy contact with
other people and the Metro proves to be a particularly fertile terrain for
this new interest. Whereas initially, she is bewildered and shocked by the
experience of moving about between the masses in the Metro—el Cacho
mockingly answers her observation that is has been a long time since
she last took the subway with “Y, por lo visto, hoy el metro te tomó a
ti” (Nettel 2006, p. 103)—at later times she is led by La Cosa into the
streets and the metro stations, and she values the experience. The previ-
ously extremely misanthropic and prudish Ana even starts to take inter-
est in actively sensing other people’s bodies: “En el vagón me dediqué
a sentir los cuerpos húmedos y tibios de la gente” (2006, p. 188). In
terms of spatial experience, Ana seems to discover Henri Lefebvre’s “rep-
resentational space” that is being flattened out in the normative model of
32 L. FRANÇOIS
abstract space through her explorations of the Metro. As Lefebvre recalls,

“representational space” is the space of the imagination, of creativity and
of a poetic understanding of life. The Marxist philosopher considers it an
essential task for modern-day society to recover it, as it is also the space
of the body and the senses as opposed to the “cold” rationality of vision:
“The restoration of the body means, first and foremost, the restoration
of the sensory-sensual, of speech, of the voice, of smell, of hearing. In
short, of the non-visual. And of the sexual—though not in the sense of
sex considered in isolation, but rather in the sense of a sexual energy
directed toward a specific discharge and flowing according to specific
rhythms” (Lefebvre 1991, p. 363). The Metro, in this sense, functions as
the place where other senses and other experiences are activated.6
What is more, this stimulation does not only have an impact on the
individual level, but it also accounts for a different social imaginary of
space. As has been mentioned in the introduction, Carlos Monsiváis
identified taking the subway as one of those “rituals of chaos” charac-
teristic of life in the Mexican capital. The experience of compression
as it takes place in the Metro, according to Monsiváis, induces a ques-
tioning of the boundaries of self and other, so that it helps to think
of oneself as more than a separate entity: “En el Metro, la estructura
molecular detiene su imperio universal, las anatomías se funden como
si fuesen esencias espirituales, y las combinaciones transcorporales se
imponen” (2001, p. 112). El huésped explores the liberating side of
this idea: through the subterranean compression that Ana experiments
in the Metro, she finally succeeds in seeing herself as a plural being
(López-Labourdette 2012, pp. 159–164), as belonging to a larger
whole instead of existing in isolation. This way, the novel adopts a
point of view that could be considered as the social equivalent to the
“volumetric perspective” that Anderson (2016) proposes as a possible
way to break through the dominance of the rational, geopolitical gaze.
The emphasis on volume is, in this novel, not important in an ecolog-
ical sense, in other words, it does not lead the reader to reflect upon
how mankind “digs into” the earth and makes use of natural resources,
but rather in an experiential and social one: volume, as opposed to
cartographic abstraction and discrete boundaries, is what is needed by
the body to experience, and it is what is needed to leave behind the
conception of the body as an entity that is strictly separated from its
immediate environment and that should be protected from the pres-
ence of others.
In this sense, it could be said, at first sight, that El huésped describes

the Metro as an apt place for social change. The group of beggars not
only creates an alternative community, whose members show solidar-
ity toward each other, but it also organizes (small) forms of protest and
acts of inconformity with politics, as is the case of the envelopes filled
with human excrements. El Cacho is the implicit leader of this move-
ment, and its driving force at an ideological level—in an interview, Nettel
has mentioned that she took el Subcomandante Marcos, the intellectual
leader of the armed Zapatista movement in Chiapas, as a model for his
character (Punzano Sierra 2006). Nonetheless, as Ana discovers nearly at
the end of the novel, El Cacho lives in a nice little apartment, as opposed
to the other members of the group, of whom most are homeless, and
betrays thus the ideals of social and urban revolution he himself advo-
cates. The alternative vision offered by the Metro and the organization
of beggars should neither, by consequence, be considered pure nor
unproblematic. El huésped points to the acceptance of plurality and the
discovery of sensual and social being; what it does not do, however, is to
present these processes as unilaterally beneficial and coherent. The pro-
tagonist, which toward the end of the novel should be considered at least
as a mix of Ana and La Cosa, is drawn to a way of life that frees her from
the limiting impact of her bourgeois perspective, but which also is struc-
tured by darkness, hypocrisy and repugnance. In the same vein, it can be
noted that the liberty provided by the group is also relative: they live not
by official laws, but by their own rules. This way, several elements in the
novel itself contradict a unilaterally utopian reading of the Metro and the
group of beggars. What the subway offers is not a redemption, but an
ambiguous, discontinuous expansion of perspectives.
Thus, El huésped presents the Metro as an alternative to the flat-
tening, rational discourse with which the modern city demands to be
approached, but it does not offer any certainty about the effects of this
alternative. In so doing, the novel ultimately problematizes the norma-
tive view represented by that part of Ana’s character which is not being
dominated by La Cosa, and questions the utility of thinking in terms of
order and chaos. Precisely because they are not presented as solutions or
revolutionary stances, experiences in the Metro add plurality to the dis-
cussion, and break dichotomic visions on order and disorder, on what is
good and what is bad. This is made clear in descriptions of Ana’s percep-
tion of the city in general. When she observes the city, Ana perceives the
same duality that characterizes her personality:
34 L. FRANÇOIS
Yo, que desde hacía tantos años llevaba un parásito dentro, lo sabía mejor
que nadie; también la ciudad se estaba desdoblando, también ella empez-
aba a cambiar de piel y de ojos. El proceso era inevitable, al menos ésa
era mi impresión, y solamente esperaba que esa otra cosa, LA COSA
urbana, no permeara a los subsuelos, para que al menos quedara en la ciu-
dad ese espacio libre como a mí me quedaría la memoria. (Nettel 2006,
pp. 175–176)
In the same way Ana experiments the rise of La Cosa inside her, an
unknown presence is taking over Mexico City. Through her traditional
perspective, however, Ana identifies “LA COSA urbana” unilaterally as
an urban monster, as the problems suffered in the megacity—corruption,
ugliness, repression—and of which she only recently is becoming aware.
What she fails to see at this moment is the way in which these problems
are now visible to her because of the widening of her experiences and
knowledge. “LA COSA urbana,” as the Metro itself, appears as chaotic
and unpleasant to a normative eye, but it is, in the end, what makes up
the heterogeneous tissue of today’s megacities. As in the case of Ana
and La Cosa, between whom occurs a kind of reconciliation at the end
of the novel, getting a closer look at what has always been seen merely
as a problem, is fundamental for a plural understanding of the urban
landscape.
Massage in the Metro: The Writings

of Mario Bellatin
Blindness, bodily sensations and the presence of crowds of travelers are

also the ingredients of a recurrent cluster of elements that appears in
texts written by Mario Bellatin. As can be seen in his work and that of
many of his critics, Bellatin’s ever-unfinished, “procedural” conception
of writing (Cote Botero 2014; Laddaga 2007, p. 10) leads to the pres-
ence of several situations, sequences or themes in more than one text.
One of those sequences describes a situation in which a character goes
to the subway in order to receive a massage by a blind beggar, while he
observes the presence of thousands of people moving about around the
small glass cabin in which he receives his treatment. Significantly, this
sequence is invariably embedded in the reflections of the characters—
an unidentified “I” in the case of “Giradores en torno a mi tumba,”
the ghost of a writer called, among other names, “Mario Bellatin” in
Disecado, and an “I” that bears striking resemblances to Bellatin himself

in El libro uruguayo de los muertos—on the ideal circumstances offered by
the urban environment of Mexico City for writing. My point of depar-
ture for this analysis is “Giradores en torno a mi tumba,” where this
sequence appears in its most pure form, with a minimum of interferences
from other storylines and descriptions. As in the case of Nettel’s text,
the descent into the subway is fundamental for the discovery of alterna-
tive realities and the recovery of sensoriality, which, in this short story, is
a necessary condition for the realization of the aesthetic potential con-
tained in the urban environment.
“Giradores en torno a mi tumba” starts with a reflection by the narra-
tor—who, as in most of Bellatin’s fictions, can be thought of as Bellatin
or one of his alter egos, but not necessarily so—on the way in which his
anguish is a necessary state of mind for writing. He describes sudden
panic attacks that strike him without any apparent reason and points to
writing as a temporary cure for them. From this point onwards, through
small corrections and further elaborations, the reader gets more and
more insight in the relationship between these alarming states of mind,
writing and the cityscape. As the narrator tells us, another cure for this
anguish consists of venturing into the multitudes of the city or into
the Metro, experiences which in turn contribute to the creation of the
ideal conditions for writing. What the protagonist of the story needs is
something he describes as a feeling of being “acompañado en el vacío,”
(Bellatin 2014, p. 649) the sensation that he is alone while being sur-
rounded by a lot of people who, however, do not interfere in his pri-
vate sphere: “Aquí permanecemos, yo y mi angustia, ajenos a muchas de
las actividades que se desarrollan alrededor. Nadie tiene que ser testigo
de mi desánimo. Yo solo frente a las palabras que debo crear. Todo lo
demás, el tráfago humano, el desarrollo cultural, lo percibo como un
vago rumor” (Bellatin 2014, p. 648). The self-imposed isolation of the
protagonist is necessary for writing, but the presence of this vague rumor
of the crowds also is: it functions as the background against which his
writing-in-accompanied-solitude can take place. In this initial approach,
writing can be seen metaphorically as a practice that sets itself apart from
its context, while it nevertheless continues to be obliquely conscious of
that same context.
This “being accompanied in the void” is something which, according
to the narrator, no other place can offer to such a high degree as Mexico
36 L. FRANÇOIS
City. In his characterization of the city, he combines the stereotypical

complaints about the problems of chaos and security—he refers to the
city as a “vortex” and as “disproportionate,” characterized by “el tráfago
humano” (Bellatin 2014, p. 648), the human hustle—with the valoriza-
tion of a much less suspected appreciation: he talks about his house in
one of the central quarters as “un rincón de paz en el jolgorio” (2014,
p. 648), which gives a more festive and joyful nuance to what he
describes earlier as a “vortex,” and he explains the paradox of finding,
precisely in this environment, the most quietness: “A pesar del desorden
y la desproporción, México D. F. es la ciudad donde he podido encontrar
el silencio mayor, aquel que se magnifica por saber que la tranquilidad
puede ser quebrada en cualquier momento para dar paso a la inmersión
dentro de una dinámica de multitudes” (2014, p. 649). In this sense,
the extremes of “order” and “disorder” start to be blurred: as Bellatin’s
narrator makes evident, they constitute two mutually constitutive poles,
which do not exist out of the semantic field they structure. Chaos and
order are two conceptualizations that can never be absolute, and that
can even be used to describe the same phenomena. Silence can only be
achieved when one is conscious of the possibility of its interruption; the
hustle is what makes solitude visible and bearable at the same time.
The feeling of being alone among crowds in itself is described as a
cure for anguish, but this cure is at least partly attained by the fact that
this sensation enables the process of writing. In this respect, Bellatin’s
narrator appears to have a lot in common with the figure of the liter-
ary flâneur as a writer who permanently negotiates between his isola-
tion and immersion in the urban crowds. As Elisabeth Rechniewski has
noted, “the stance of the flâneur is an inherently unstable one, poised
between alienation and fascination, between insularity and dependence”
(2011, p. 101). The protagonist of “Giradores en torno a mi tumba,”
specifically, resonates with the Sartrean flâneur of La nausée, Antoine
Roquentin. Like Bellatin’s narrator, Roquentin is frequently besieged
by inexplicable panic attacks, which he describes as “la nausée,” nausea
provoked by the existence and the oppressive conscience of freedom.
And like Bellatin’s narrator, he goes on long walks through the city in
the hope that he will be (temporarily) cured from his anguish, and finds
consolation in writing about it (Tester 1994, pp. 9–11). However, as
the Mexican short story indicates, writing in itself is an ambiguous activ-
ity, and even risks provoking new episodes of suffering. While Sartre’s
Roquentin finds the final solution in writing as a didactic, intellectual
and autobiographical project in order to be able to accept himself,

Bellatin’s narrator aims at an autonomist poetics, which tries to dis-
cover a purely aesthetic space—a claim that has also been made about
the work of Mario Bellatin himself (Quintero 2014)—, but which entails
the risk of distancing the writer even more from his direct environment.
“Being accompanied in the void,” on the one hand, accounts for a cer-
tain purification of literature as a mostly autoreferential activity, as a use
of literary discourse as an inherent necessity rather than as a means for
getting a grip on reality:
[e]sta situación de sentirme acompañado en el vacío ha hecho posi-

ble que mi escritura se cuestione cada vez más sobre sí misma. Que los
mundos que aparecen representados en los libros obedezcan de una man-
era creciente a las leyes que la propia escritura ha ido creando a través del
tiempo. […] La literatura como espacio necesario, no como recurso que
se haya podido elegir para reflejar determinada situación. (Bellatin 2014,
pp. 649–650)
On the other hand, this autonomist conception of writing is likely to

provoke a new spread of anguish: “Hay ocasiones en que esta situación
me produce miedo. Tengo la sensación de que terminaré aniquilado por
mis propios mundos” (Bellatin 2014, p. 650). When the literary worlds
created by the writer drift away from reality and threaten to withdraw
into pure silence by canceling the vague rumor that normally surrounds
him, writing becomes the cause rather than the cure of his distress.
When this circle is completed and the narrator seems to be trapped
in the dynamics of easing and fortifying his distress through writing, he
decides to go to the market or to the Metro. It is, however, in the Metro
where he comes to new realizations about his mental state of affairs. In
one of the most crowded stations of the subway, he directs himself to
the stand of a blind man who gives massages in a small cabin with glass
walls that is barely covered by a perforated curtain. During the massage,
the distance that separates the narrator from the crowds is reduced to a
minimum: “Me desnudo a menos de quince centímetros de miles de per-
sonas en constante movimiento” (Bellatin 2014, p. 651). While in earlier
passages, the narrator describes the necessity of being alone while exper-
imenting the urban crowds only as a vague rumor from the other side
of the walls, the reduction of distance to only a couple of centimeters,
the fact that the narrator can see the travelers and can be seen by them,
38 L. FRANÇOIS
and the corporeal contact that evidently takes place during the massage,
suggest that the massage in the Metro is a way to reduce precisely the
gap between the individual and the multitude, or between private space
and the urban landscape, without erasing it altogether, as there still is
a glass wall between them. What is more, the activities performed by
the blind man while he is giving the massage—receiving money from a
sect of blind people living in the Metro of which he is the leader, and
giving advice to them when they have been badly treated by traffic
officers—brings the narrator in touch with a particular social universe.
As in El huésped, with which this story strikingly shares the imaginary
of an organization of blind beggars that is operating in the Metro, the
isolation of the protagonist is overcome. Here, as in Nettel’s novel, the
Metro functions as a compression mechanism and a detonator of corpo-
ral and social experience. In opposition to the “normal,” divided space
where each place corresponds to a particular possession and function, the
subway offers the possibility of recuperating the “representational space”
that regulates our symbolic and sensorial understanding of the world in
which we live.
This partial overcoming of solitude and isolation also has its conse-
quences at the level of writing. As Sergio Delgado has shown with
respect to Bellatin’s novel Salón de belleza, a strong connection can be
made, in his work, between the two main historical meanings of the
“aesthetic”; these are, on the one hand, its current sense, referring to
the beautiful, specifically in the arts, and on the other hand, the mean-
ing it had up until the eighteenth century, and which includes everything
that can be experimented through the senses (Delgado 2011, p. 70). A
similar association can be made in the case of “Giradores en torno a mi
tumba”: precisely at the moment when the narrator finds himself naked
on the massaging bed, in close corporal contact with the blind man and
in the proximity of thousands of travelers, he receives a kind of epiphany
with respect to his literature. This sudden realization corrects his earlier
reflections on the act of writing: “Constato entonces que no hay equivo-
cación possible. Que a pesar de las tinieblas en que a veces están inmersas
mis palabras, en sus aparentes faltas de sentido, se encuentra presente la
realidad. Lo constato con las cientos de gentes que, lo quería ignorar, me
estuvieron rodeando todo el tiempo. La palabra, los textos, no era cierto
que se gestaban en la soledad más absoluta” (Bellatin 2014, p. 651).
What the narrator first conceptualized as a fissure between self and mul-
titude, as something to be realized in a solitude that is only underscored
by the vague rumor of the city, turns out to be a connection.7 Writing,

he seems to realize, is not about demarcating oneself from background
rumor, but about actively engaging with it.
This engagement is not to be seen as the didactic project which is
the resolution of Antoine Roquentin’s anguish in La nausée. Nor is it,
the central character of the short story insists, the use of literature “as
a means that can be chosen to reflect a certain reality” (Bellatin 2014,
p. 650). The darkness of the words the writer uses continues to under-
mine a conception of his writing as logically coherent, as a discourse with
a primarily referential function. However, while this absence of referenti-
ality was first described as a fissure between the self and the other, it now
becomes conceptualized as precisely the way in which the self engages
with the other and its reality through literary discourse. This engage-
ment is not logically coherent; through the strange, autonomous worlds
of the writer in the story, whose writing bears a strong resemblance to
the writer of the story, reality is present, not represented. The clear sepa-
ration that the narrator had first observed between discourse and reality
thus ceases to hold, and it can be said that writing and reality become
intertwined rather than that they exist as parallels. In this context, several
literary critics have characterized Bellatin’s writing as “rhizomatic,” in
reference to the concept proposed by Deleuze and Guattari in Mille pla-
teaux (Quintero 2014; Morris 2012). The concept of the “rhizome,” as
Deleuze and Guattari explain, refers to a decentered, dynamic multiplic-
ity and contrasts with the metaphor of the root and the tree that refers
to classical hierarchical and binary thinking (1987, pp. 3–25). This con-
ception is certainly applicable to the recycling mechanisms of Bellatin’s
poetics, but it also informs the way in which the character of “Giradores
en torno a mi tumba” comes to see writing: as Deleuze and Guattari
note, “contrary to a deeply rooted belief, the book is not an image of
the world. It forms a rhizome with the world, there is an aparallel evolu-
tion of the book and the world” (1987, p. 11). As the character realizes
in the Metro, his writing neither isolates itself from reality as an auton-
omous sphere, nor reflects its elements, but intertwines with its non-
formatted, incoherent, illogical substance.
The Metro immerses the self in the multitude and cancels her imagi-
nary isolation; it thus provokes the rhizome to multiply and to reproduce
itself into different fragments of text and different worlds. The char-
acter of the short story acknowledges that his work consists of “hallar
el punto no evidente que se presenta en cualquier conducta concreta”
40 L. FRANÇOIS
(Bellatin 2014, p. 652); this is, to discover the point where any con-
crete conduct touches the absurd and, in so doing, opens up to a vari-
ety of inscriptions and interpretations. This is another way to adopt the
“volumetric perspective” commented by Mark Anderson (2016): it
surpasses the bidimensionality of the page and the idea of writing as an
activity to be completed in isolation from the exterior world, in order
to activate the tridimensional dynamics of the rhizome. Instead of the
separation between the autonomous worlds of literary discourse and
reality, the experiences of the narrator in the Metro activate a sense of
containment in the masses, a sense of copresence of reality and writing,
without reducing the latter to a reflection of the former. This realiza-
tion about writing brings the character back to the theme of the city;
he concludes, right after his reference to the “non-evident point in each
concrete behavior,” that, in spite of all the problems that originate in
the megacity, his choice to work in Mexico City is the right one. The
city itself, then, becomes the ideal rhizomatic environment for literary
creation in the way in which the narrator of “Giradores en torno a mi
tumba” understands it. Rather than sticking to a unilateral focus on “las
incomodidades de esta ciudad, de su inseguridad, de la engañosa amab-
ilidad o la ética del horror” (Bellatin 2014, p. 652), the narrator is led,
through his visit to the Metro and the massage, to appreciate the hetero-
geneity of urban experience. Writing (and living), in this sense, does not
occur between walls, with the dynamics of the city as a mere background
rumor, but it actively engages with them. It overcomes the separation
between the inside and the outside, the autonomous, orderly world of
discourse and the “chaotic” tissue of reality.
Here too, as in the case of Nettel’s novel, however, the text does not
admit a unilaterally utopic reading. Although there is a sense of salvation
to this conception of literature and of the city, this redemption can nei-
ther be absolute nor stable. One of the aspects that complicate the image
of redemption through a nomadic sense of writing is a certain twist at
the end, when the narrator notes that his choice to work in Mexico City
is the right one, but relates it to the fact that he has even already pre-
pared his burial in this city. This way, it becomes clear that the existential
doubts that force him to write and to go out into the crowds do not
disappear, but are only momentarily eased. The desire toward death is
not expelled, it is postponed and reformulated—as is the obsession with
death in most of Bellatin’s texts. The rhizomatic engagement with reality
is neither necessarily univocally benign nor definitive, as is reality itself.
The quest for an aesthetic space, in this sense, seems to connect more
closely, again, to the eighteenth century definition of the aesthetic, as
the whole of phenomena that can be experimented through the senses.
It is neither a quest for the beautiful nor for the good; it is an immer-
sion in the complex and dynamic flows of everyday life. A variation of the
massage-in-the-Metro-sequence that appears in El libro uruguayo de los
muertos adds to this ambiguity, when the narrator describes not only the
benign effects of the massage, but also a kind of anger he senses while
receiving it:
Creo que encontrarme desnudo sobre la cama mugrosa de un ciego [líder

de los invidentes] es algo pero que oír los trucos de la estafadora que se
hace pasar por psicóloga. […] Encontrarme en una situación semejante
hizo posible que, de algún modo, me rebelara, aunque siento todavía una
especie de coraje profundo al sentir que el amor envuelve al amante hasta
mezclarse con todas sus partes, y que en la pasión amorosa el amante está
siempre bajo potestad del amado. (Bellatin 2014, p. 66)
The dependency of the lover and the loved one suggests that the mas-
sage does not have simply benign effects, but that it is, in fact, an addic-
tion, and an ultimately humiliating activity. Likewise, the constant
movement and hustle of Mexico City is a starting point for the narrator
to write, but this is in no way a glorification or concealment of the prob-
lems of violence and insecurity that also exist in the metropolis, of which
several examples from “Giradores en torno a mi tumba” have already
been mentioned.8 Yet again, what the Metro adds to the experience of
the city is a certain opening of the sensory and aesthetic pallet, but it is
in no way a utopic space that functions as an opposition to the surface.
The City Is the Heaven of the Subway

The characters’ perception of the city in El huésped and in “Giradores en
torno a mi tumba”—and, of course, the other texts of Mario Bellatin in
which the massage-in-the-Metro-sequence appears—is initially strongly
controlled by a divisive, normative and structured vision. The implicit
assumption that the urban environment should be ordered is realized in
a social sense in the case of Nettel, where it is responsible for the indi-
vidualistic, bourgeois and antipathetic personality of the protagonist,
and in an aesthetic sense in Bellatin’s, as the belief that the urban rumor
42 L. FRANÇOIS
can be an inspiration for writing only when it is kept at a distance, with-

out interfering in the autonomous world of literary creation, and pro-
tected metaphorically by the four walls of the artist’s workspace. The
urban landscape is evaluated initially along the lines of the order/dis-
order binary, in terms of its degree of conformity to “abstract space.”
Throughout the narrations, however, and most importantly, throughout
the visits to the Metro, the binary underpinnings of these perspectives
become blurred. The “volumetric perspective” advocated for by Mark
Anderson is realized in these texts at a poetic and sensorial level, as if
urban experience reacquires, literally and metaphorically, depth through
the rediscovery of dimensionality. Ana and La Cosa cease to be opposite
poles and open up together to the diversity of the city, and the narra-
tor of “Giradores en torno a mi tumba” realizes that his textual worlds
are neither reflections of nor separated from outside reality. Although the
texts do not aspire to present these processes as solutions to the city’s
problems, an enriching of symbolic and bodily understanding of the city-
scape is at their core.
This way, both narrations explore an alternative way to approach the
underground transportation system from a literary perspective, beyond
the dystopic and hellish imaginaries, on the one hand, and the political
metaphors of progress, on the other. As Anderson indicates, not every
literary work that refers to the Metro is also susceptible of adopting a
“volumetric perspective,” but several examples can be found of recent
literary texts that, each in their own way, invite their readers, or con-
tain at least the suggestion, to consider the city from a new perspective
(Anderson 2016). In Mauricio Montiel Figueiras’s La penumbra incon-
veniente (2001), a character called Diego decides to give up his monoto-
nous office life and flee from the problems in his marriage in order to live
in the Metro, where he feels comfortably dissociated from his previous
identity. This dissociation leads ultimately to suicide, which is described
in terms both of doom and of relief. The protagonist space of Valeria
Luiselli’s Los ingrávidos (2013) is the New York subway, but this envi-
ronment maintains a strong connection with Mexico City, from where
one of the narrative threads is written. Luiselli relies on Ezra Pound and
Gilberto Owen’s writings in order to confuse identities, times and spaces.
This way, the subway becomes the main contact site for past and pres-
ent, for fiction and reality, and for Mexico City and New York. In Laia
Jufresa’s short story “El esquinista” (2015), the actual Mexico City con-
stitutes the underground of a new city that is mainly constructed in the
air. This particular “underground” functions as an aesthetic repository

for the artist who is the main character: he draws forms by observing the
structures and lines that can be seen below his feet. And although Juan
Villoro’s crónica on the Mexican Metro is intended to be a social, histor-
ical and ideological critique of the subway, its last lines suggest the possi-
bility of a different, literary reading: “Perhaps the one real compensation
of the subterranean world is to picture the surface from down there.
Perhaps the lesson of the tunnels is to bestow a different value upon the
streets, to demonstrate, in secret, that the city is the heaven of the sub-
way” (2004, pp. 131–132). A certain zone of contemporary literature,
then, can be read as examples of the way in which the image of the city
can break through its ideological straitjacket when it is seen from below
when it is seen as “the heaven of the subway.”
Notes
1. For other references, see, for instance, Ordiz (2014) and Santos López
(2012).
2. Many intellectuals and writers from these centuries have shown a clear fas-
cination toward technological evolutions: in the case of Mexico, the avant-
garde movement of the Estridentistas is the best-known example of the
poetical recuperation of a city progressively organized around machinery
and modern technology. The attraction of the modern metropolises has
also taken the shape of a preference for exploration and curiosity, which,
in Latin America, has given way to a solid tradition of crónicas that sought
to capture and reassemble the heterogeneous and fragmentary city impres-
sions into new narratives (Ramos 2009, pp. 213–260).
3. These ideas were condensed in, among other examples, Walter Benjamin’s
elegy of the flâneur—although it can be seen that in other uses of flânerie,
this activity precisely functions as a defense mechanism against the frag-
mentary nature of new urban phenomena—and Georg Simmel’s famous
essay on the overstimulation by the new city centers, “The Metropolis and
Mental Life.” Texts like these depart from the premise that urban growth
is detrimental to individual as well as social well-being. This perspective
has, throughout the last half of the twentieth century and the beginning
of the twenty-first century, overshadowed the early enthusiasm of futur-
ists and cronistas, and relegated the “rational” and “optimistic” vision on
expansion and development to the domain of urban planning and engi-
neering. In today’s metropolises, as Kevin Lynch and Fredric Jameson
would have it, urban growth “has finally succeeded in transcending the
capacities of the individual human body to locate itself, to organize its
44 L. FRANÇOIS
immediate surroundings perceptually, and cognitively to map its position

in a mappable external world” (Jameson 1991, p. 44).
4. It can be noted that, although Luiselli considers the flâneur an outdated
figure, her plea for the bicycle as the present-day alternative bears a lot of
resemblance to the same ideas that can be found in the literary bibliogra-
phy on flânerie.
5. More examples of Ana’s bourgeois and individualistic perspective can
be found in the dissertation by Véronique Pitois-Pallares (2015, pp.
280–296).
6. In Metropolis on the Styx, David Pike pursues the parallel between the
underground and “lived space” even further by equating them and oppos-
ing them to the “abstract space” of the surface (2007, pp. 12–13).
7. Significantly, a variation of the massage-in-the-Metro-sequence in El libro
uruguayo de los muertos identifies the idea that the writing of the character
needs to take place in complete solitude as an interpretation imposed by an
unidentified “you.” This way, the character seems to rebel against a certain
misreading of his texts.
8. Another significant mention, in this context, appears in the comparison the
narrator makes between the dirty sheets of the massaging bed and Frida
Kahlo’s painting Unos cuantos piquetitos (A Few Small Nips): this painting
is based on a newspaper article about the murder of a young woman by
her husband, who said he administered only some light nips. Nonetheless,
it can be seen as one of the indications that inspire the narrator to get
to the conclusion that there is something of reality in his works, however
absurd and distanced from the everyday world his fictional worlds might
seem at first sight. Unos cuantos piquetitos reveals the absurdity and appar-
ent fictionality of reality itself; its resistance to comprehension and to a log-
ically coherent story or explanation.
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CHAPTER 3
Spectral Spaces: Haunting in the Latin

American City
Marta Sierra
Spectral Cities
A child coming back from the grave, a villa haunted by unwanted pres-
ences, a mysterious substance that turns bodies into ghosts. In the nar-
ratives by Mariana Enríquez (2016) and Samanta Schweblin (2015), the
city becomes a haunted space where strange occurrences happen. Their
short stories move away from the city and its urban dreams. They build
what Marc Augé (1997) calls a “non-place,” a hollow place that con-
nects reality and fiction, the natural and the supernatural. Their haunted
spaces show the disruption of what Julian Holloway and James Kneale
name as the affordances of objects, and the normalized configurations
of materiality, embodiment and space (2008, p. 303). Spectral presences
disrupt the relationship between space and its object relations as they dis-
locate the material world, and unsettle our senses of place.
How can we interpret this turn away from the city as the beacon of
modernity and rationality? The city no longer expresses social order; it
is no longer the lettered city that Rama had in mind when writing about
M. Sierra (*) 
Kenyon College, Gambier, OH, USA

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-92438-0_3
48 M. SIERRA
the formation of modernity in Latin America. In the nineteenth cen-

tury, the Latin American city came to represent the elites’ desire to con-
trol the social order, an ideal that Henri Lefebvre calls the “conceived”
space, the abstract and conceptualized space of urbanism (1991, p. 38).
On the contrary, in the twenty-first century, cities have lost their mean-
ing and their “rationality”: “In contrast to what Habermas observed in
early periods of modernity, the public sphere is no longer the place of
rational participation from which the social order is determined” (García
Canclini 2005, p. 208). As depicted by Enríquez and Schweblin, urban
spaces become fragmented and deterritorialized, building what I would
like to term as a “post-urban” space, a space that shows displacement
and dislocation of social relationships. García Canclini describes well this
post-urban space: “The disarticulation of the urban also puts into doubt
the possibility of cultural systems’ finding their key in the relations of the
population with a certain type of territory and history that would, in a
peculiar sense, prefigure the behaviors of each group. The next step in
this analysis must be to work with the (combined) processes of decollect-
ing and deterritorialization” (2005, p. 223).
A city of ghosts, that is. Ghosts that acquire many faces in the stories
here analyzed. In some instances, there is a clear reference to issues of
trauma and historical memory prompted by the realities of post-dicta-
torial Argentina. Although not immediately evident in some of the sto-
ries, there is the recurrent theme of the ghosts from the violent past that
still haunts Argentinean society. Uncanny narratives adopt the form of an
unstable discourse that in many ways resembles the structure of allegory
as defined by Idelber Avelar in his theorizations regarding allegory and
mourning. Whereas the symbol rounds up a closured totality in which
image and meaning, sign and concept are one, allegory embodies the
notion of a ruin, an “abrupt, undialectical discontinuity” (Avelar 1999,
p. 6). The texts I study here exhibit this form of discontinuity, the dis-
continuity of mourning. The fantastic genre shows it as well: “The oxy-
moron is the basic trope of fantasy, because it is a figure of speech which
holds together contradictions, and sustains them in an impossible unity,
without progressing towards synthesis” (Jackson 1995, p. 21). The
uncanny shares with the fantastic the lack of closure in the story, placing
both the characters and the reader in a situation of uncertainty. Avelar’s
theories on allegory and mourning describe the temporality of post-
dictatorship fiction as “untimely.” “The untimely takes distance from
the present, estranges itself from it by carrying and caring for the seeds
of time. An untimely reading of the present will, then, at the same time
3 SPECTRAL SPACES: HAUNTING IN THE LATIN AMERICAN CITY 49
rescue past defeats out of oblivion and remain open to an as yet unimag-
inable future” (1999, pp. 20–21). It is in the recurrence of the past that
we can find many of the spectral presences that emerge in the stories.
Whether or not it reflects the traumatic realities of Argentina, the
ghost that materializes in these stories is not only a fantastic trope but
also a social figure acquiring different meanings. As Avery Gordon states,
haunting is a way of knowing, a way of experiencing what has happened.
“Being haunted draws us affectively, sometimes against our will and
always a bit magically, into the structure of feeling of a reality we come to
experience, not as a cold knowledge, but as a transformative recognition”
(2008, p. 8). What I would like to address in this essay is the ethical and
political potential of such spectral geographies, as the city becomes a site
for experimentation and questioning of what is perceived as the estab-
lished social order. In other words, I propose that the ghost is an unsta-
ble discourse or epistemology that questions established formations of
knowledge, and that invokes what is placed outside it, excluded from the
archive of the acknowledged past and the reimagined present and future.
The City and Its Ghosts

Mariana Enríquez locates her stories on the margins of the modern city.
Such decentering characterizes what we can call post-urbanism: in the
post-urban sensibility the margins have entirely invaded the center and
disseminated its focus. And with the dissolution of urban space comes
the disappearance of the body as the original paradigm of order for
urbanism (Vidler 1992, p. 15). As Steven Pile reminds us, the ghost lives
in that in-between space, in the thresholds of the city: “The appearance
of the ghost is a marker of a threshold: between one world and another.
Indeed, the ghost crosses over between worlds, existing fully in neither,
unable to find a proper place. Although the ghost appears to be free, it
marks a space of dislocation—a space where worlds are inverted, where
thresholds can be crossed” (2005, p. 139).
There is no story where this is more evident as in “El chico sucio”
(“The Dirty Kid”). The story takes place in Constitución, a neighbor-
hood that once enjoyed a great reputation:
Constitución es el barrio de la estación de trenes que vienen del sur a la

ciudad. Fue, en el siglo XIX, una zona donde vivía la aristocracia porteña,
por eso existen estas casas, como la de mi familia—y hay muchas más
mansiones convertidas en hoteles o asilos de ancianos o en derrumbe del
50 M. SIERRA
otro lado de la estación, en Barracas—. En 1887 las familias aristocráticas

huyeron hacia el norte de la ciudad escapando de la fiebre amarilla. Pocas
volvieron, casi ninguna. Con los años, familias de comerciantes ricos, como
la de mi abuelo, pudieron comprar las casas de piedra con gárgolas y llama-
dores de bronce. Pero el barrio quedó marcado por la huida, el abandono,
la condición de indeseado.
Y está cada vez peor. (Enríquez 2016, p. 10)
“El chico sucio” places us in a threshold that is both spatial (the bor-
der between Constitución and Barracas) and temporal (the present and
the bygone days of wealth and prestige). The city that the story describes
is a city populated by ghosts coming from stories cultivated by popular
imagination. One of them is “El gauchito Gil.” According to the legend
that takes place at the end of the nineteenth century, the police followed
and later captured Mamerto Antonio Gil Núñez, who was accused of
desertion. The police tried many times to end his life, but the belief is
that “San La Muerte” protected him. “El chico sucio” has references to
both figures: “El gauchito Gil” is considered a saint that produces mir-
acles helping people, and “San La Muerte” is a protector of those who
live a violent life, burglars and drug dealers who, people believe, offer the
saint children as human sacrifices.
In the story, two of the main characters are a homeless pregnant
mother and her son. The protagonist is a young woman who—contra-
dicting her family’s advice—lives in the old family house. The “dirty
kid” and her mother live on her street corner. She has seen the kid many
times begging in the trains that go to the capital: he hands out prayer
cards of Saint Expeditus in exchange for money: “Tiene un método muy
inquietante; después de ofrecerles la estampita a los pasajeros, los obliga a
darle la mano, un apretón breve y mugriento. Los pasajeros contienen la
pena y el asco: el chico está sucio y apesta, pero nunca vi a nadie lo sufi-
cientemente compasivo como para sacarlo del subte, llevárselo a su casa,
darle un baño, llamar a asistentes sociales” (Enríquez 2016, p. 14).
The story shows the protagonist as someone who is comfortable liv-
ing in the margins of society. Surrounded by the dangers of the neigh-
borhood, she seems to enjoy an immunity that keeps her protected.
Contrary to the revulsion experienced by the train passengers, she thinks
of the kid and his mother as two unlucky people who need her help. The
fact that she is comfortable in the neighborhood changes when, one day,
after the mother and the dirty kid disappear, the police find the body
of a little kid decapitated, and showing signs of torture. The narrator is
convinced the body belongs to the kid, and that he was sacrificed in a
“San La Muerte” ritual. However, she cannot identify the body, leaving
open the possibility that the victim is not the dirty kid. At this point, her
narrative position changes to one of fear and hesitation. Haunted spaces
embody an interpretative position caught or frozen between a familiar
explanation of events, and a purely supernatural explanation of situa-
tions. In “El chico sucio,” haunting becomes both a textual process—an
unstable discourse that drags the reader into doubt—and an interpreta-
tive position that shows the narrator’s internal instability.
As Rosemary Jackson explains, the fantastic and the spectral share
many traits:
“The etymology of the word fantastic points to an essential ambiguity:
it is un-real. Like the ghost, which is neither dead nor alive, the fantas-
tic is a spectral presence, suspended between being and nothingness. It
takes the real and breaks it” (1995, p. 20). The fantastic opens a wound
in the real; Bataille refers to this kind of infraction as “une déchirure,”
a tear, a wound, laid open in the side of the real (Jackson 1995, p. 21).
The stability of the narrator’s world is torn apart by the emergence of
the child’s crime, also challenging the securities associated with her social
class. The story destabilizes space and with it, her social identity. Antony
Vidler describes “spatial fear” as built upon the figures of the double and
derealization: the uncanny expresses a sense of strangeness and homeless-
ness that embody the fear of modernity represented by the bourgeoisie
(1992, p. 9). The notion of home and the private world, foundational
concepts of the modern sense of urban space are shattered in “El chico
sucio,” pushing the narrator into a position of homelessness as evidenced
at the end of the story. What the story eventually installs is the dark space
that has otherwise been erased in modernity.1
After she finds the mother back on her corner but not the son—
according to the mother she gave the son to “them,” meaning the
witches performing the “San La Muerte” rituals—the narrator goes back
to her house only to discover that what was before, the safety of her
home no longer exists:
Cuando cerré la puerta no sentí el alivio de las habitaciones frescas, de

la escalera de madera, del patio interno, de los azulejos antiguos, de los
techos altos. Encendí la luz y la lámpara parpadeó: se va a quemar, pensé,
52 M. SIERRA
voy a quedar a oscuras, pero finalmente se estabilizó. Aunque daba una

luz amarillenta, antigua, de baja tensión. Me senté en el piso, con la
espalda contra la puerta. Esperaba los golpes suaves de la mano pegajosa
del chico sucio o el ruido de su cabeza rodando por la escalera. Esperaba
al chico sucio que iba a pedirme, otra vez, que lo dejara pasar. (Enríquez
2016, p. 33)
The story thus builds a spectral space, transforming the family house
into a haunted place where the narrator no longer can find refuge, and
where she awaits the return of the child. The absence, emptiness, and
the imperceptible represented by the missing boy materializes into a
representation of the city that can be described as “post-modern” and
“post-mortem.” The city is no longer her refuge: haunted by the mem-
ory of the begging boy, the protagonist experiences homelessness as the
condition of the fantastic.
The story fulfills the three conditions of the fantastic described by
Todorov, the most important being here the rejection of the allegorical or
poetic interpretations, placing this story within the category of the “pure
uncanny.”2 At the end of the story, we are left with a sense of loss. Cities
evolve and transform accommodating the ghosts from the past, revealing
what Pile defines as a “fractured emotional geography cut across by the
shards of pain, loss, injustice, and failure; an emotional world in which
the ghost is the emblematic resident” (2005, pp. 162–163). What the
story reveals at the end is that “fractured emotional geography,” showing
the fragility of social order. As another victim of a failed social network,
the child in “El chico sucio” embodies the fears of the middle-class, the
disappearance of its territorial securities. But his disappearance also points
to those erased by society, those absences in the city, the invisible citizens
marked by poverty and marginalization. Ghosts with no home, they walk
the streets everyday even when we are unable to see them.
The Monstrous Child: Embodying the Grotesque

“El patio del vecino” (“The Neighbor’s Courtyard”) takes place in an
unbecoming neighborhood soon to go through the process of gentri-
fication. Contrary to “El chico sucio,” this story does not focus on the
neighborhood’s bygone times, but rather it describes the promises of a
city to come. Everything in the story projects into the future: the story is
about a young couple moving into a new apartment filled with hopes for
better times. Paula is recovering from depression and has recently been
fired from her job, where she worked as the director of a shelter for chil-
dren at risk. From her experiences at work, we are introduced to the vio-
lence of the city, where young girls resort to prostitution to get drugs,
and abandoned children wander the streets. The harsh realities of city life
take place in the story’s background, as if they were threatening the frag-
ile happiness of the couple and their precarious domesticity. The story is
narrated from the perspective of Paula. However, we do not know what
to believe as Paula’s mental health is described as fragile. And it is in the
protagonist’s weak mental state, and in the surroundings’ spatial instabil-
ity where lies the story’s potential for the uncanny.
As in Julio Cortázar’s “Casa tomada” (“House Taken Over”), the
house is progressively invaded by strange presences. The story destabi-
lizes the sense of home and belonging that both Paula and her husband
so badly crave. In the story, there is a close connection between space
and the uncanny. As Antony Vidler states, the uncanny is a projection
of a mental state that elides the boundaries of the real and the unreal
in order to provoke a disturbing ambiguity, a slippage between waking
and dreaming; as a projection of the consciousness, it disturbs our spa-
tial perceptions (1992, p. 11). In the story, we witness the invasion of
a darkness that destabilizes any possible notion of home and that comes
from the off-space that we cannot see, the neighbor’s house. The cou-
ple’s house is invaded by dark forces in stages: first there is a pounding
on the door that wakens Paula in the middle of the night; then a mysteri-
ous kid shows up one night at the foot of the bed, abruptly disappearing
without any trace. One day Paula sees the leg of a boy chained up at
the neighbor’s courtyard and, at this point, the story takes a different
turn. She becomes obsessed with the child and breaks into the neigh-
bor’s house. Contrary to her expectations, the house is in excellent con-
dition. Nothing is out of place, the bed is made, and the kitchen is so
clean that Paula can even feel the smell of housecleaners. However, she
soon finds containers with rotten meat stored in the pantry, and the walls
of the bedroom covered with a strange writing. The house’s incongruent
elements locate the reader in the realm of the uncanny. When she comes
back home, a mysterious boy is sitting on her bed, holding her cat Elly in
his arms. Horror takes over the story:
Cuando escuchó su voz, el chico sonrió y ella le vio los dientes. Se los
habían limado y tenían forma triangular, eran como puntas de flecha,
54 M. SIERRA
como un serrucho. El chico se llevó la gata a la boca con un movimiento

velocísimo y le clavó los serruchos en la panza. Eli gritó y Paula vio la
agonía en sus ojos mientras el chico escarbaba su vientre con los dientes,
se hundía en las tripas con nariz y todo, respiraba dentro de la gata, que se
moría mirando a su dueña, con ojos enojados y sorprendidos. (Enríquez
2016, p. 152)
There are many ways in which we can read the appearance of the
monstrous child in this story. The figure of the monster embodies a
form of liminality, a body marked by the combination of the human and
the inhuman, as the description makes clear. From a psychoanalytical
approach, the monster is that which used to be a part of the self and
needed to be cast away in order for the self to become unified or, at least
functional. Repression is closely linked to the concept of the “other,”
not as external to our culture, but rather as representational of those
characteristics that we repress in order to fit into the cultural norma-
tive regime. The true Otherness is then a repressed unfamiliar familiar,
or the uncanny. Monsters represent the return of the repressed, or our
repressed collective cultural desires, anxieties and nightmares (Levina and
Bui 2013, pp. 3–4).
What the monstrous child brings to the surface of the story are the
underlying anxieties that haunt Paula, her incapacity to become accus-
tomed to domesticity, the insecurities in her marriage, the fears brought
about by her life’s changes. In a way, she also feels like a monster for
having behaved so irresponsibly at the shelter, where she got fired for
not taking care of an ill child. She is perceived as “abnormal” by oth-
ers: “Paula había pasado de ser una santa—la trabajadora social especial-
izada en chicos en riesgo, tan maternal y abnegada—a ser una empleada
pública sádica y cruel que dejaba a los chicos tirados mientras escuchaba
cumbia y se emborrachaba; se había convertido en la directora malvada
de un orfanato de pesadilla” (Enríquez 2016, p. 147).
But the child’s appearance can also be interpreted as a projection of
the story’s many liminalities: the border between reality and hallucina-
tion that Paula cannot fully distinguish; the limits between sanity and
insanity; the borders between the city of the middle-class where she lives
and the city at night, the city of drug addicts and criminals that she expe-
riences in her work. But he is also a projection of Paula’s own feeling
of monstrosity that she is afraid to confront. At the end, she is forced
to face the horror of the scene only to realize that her nightmares are
real and that she is trapped in that world that makes no sense, and that
she tried to leave: “Eran las llaves de la puerta. El chico las hizo tin-
tinear y se rió y su risa vino acompañada por un eructo sanguinolento.
Paula quiso correr, pero, como en las pesadillas, le pesaban las piernas, el
cuerpo se negaba a darse vuelta, algo la mantenía clavada en la puerta de
la habitación. Pero no estaba soñando. En los sueños no se siente dolor”
(Enríquez 2016, p. 153). With this ending, the story places the reader in
the realm of the uncanny by avoiding any form of explanation of what is
happening with the strange neighbor and the kid. We are submerged in
the world of horror that Paula is experiencing and, like her, we are una-
ble to move.
Contrary to the previous story that destabilizes the spatial order of
the family house, “Bajo el agua negra” (“Under the Black Water”) takes
the reader to a land of monsters and ghosts. The protagonist is Marina
Pinat, the district attorney working on cases that come from the city’s
south side, where crime and hardship are frequent. She is investigating
a case of police brutality. Two teenagers may have been thrown into
the Riachuelo, a polluted river at the south end of Buenos Aires, and
drowned there when they tried to swim through the black grease cover-
ing the water. The body of one of them, Emanuel, was never recovered.
The story suggests that dead Emanuel has come back from the river
where he drowned, and is later worshipped by the villa’s residents.
The location of the story in Villa Moreno next to El Riachuelo is sig-
nificant. The neighborhood is a place polluted by tanneries and factories
that have dumped chromium and other toxic waste into the water for
decades:
Detrás de esas fachadas, que eran mascarones, vivían los pobres de la ciu-
dad. Y en las dos orillas del Riachuelo miles de personas habían constru-
ido sus casas en los terrenos vacíos, desde precarios ranchos de chapa hasta
muy decentes departamentos de cemento y ladrillos. Desde el Puente se
podía ver la extensión del caserío: rodeaba el río negro y quieto, lo bor-
deaba y se perdía de vista donde el agua formaba un codo y se iba en la
distancia, junto a las chimeneas de fábricas abandonadas. (Enríquez 2016,
p. 164)
Enríquez chooses the villa as a setting for her horror story and, as in
other examples, the tale is linked to a commentary on marginalization in
the contemporary city. The villa has very distinct borders: it resembles
56 M. SIERRA
a walled city where the dead are among the living, and where the living
resemble being dead. The villa fits the territorial description of the col-
ony by Achille Mbembe and Frantz Fanon. As Achille Mbembe states,
the colony is the area where there is no state, an area of war and disor-
der, the place where the controls and guaranties of judicial order can be
suspended, where the violence of the government can dictate a state of
emergency and justify any form of violence operating to the service of
“civilization” (2011, p. 39). Biopolitics operates in the colony because
the colonial “other” is seen as an animal life without rights: the govern-
ment can kill at any time, in any form (2011, p. 40). In the colony, the
inscription of new spatial relations (territorialization) consists of produc-
ing demarcation lines and hierarchies, different “zones”; the questioning
of the sense of property; the classification of people according to differ-
ent categories (2011, p. 43). Like a colony, the villa is subjected to the
violence of the government, represented in the story through frequent
police abuse. And, as in the colony, there is biopolitics in place: the gov-
ernment can kill any time, in any form, as we see in the story about the
two teenagers who were thrown in the river by corrupt policemen. An
area subjected to a clear territorialization rules, the villa is the land of
society’s outcasts.
In the story, all forms of authority have collapsed. The only church
has been vandalized, the priest kills himself, and the police are not to
be trusted as they constantly abuse power. One of the most poignant
moments of the story is when Marina enters the church, where she finds
that a wooden pole with a cow’s head has replaced the figure of Christ.
It is clear that Marina descends to an apocalyptic land; her Virgil is a
child resembling a monster, half human and half animal: “El chico se le
acercó y, cuando estuvo a su lado, ella pudo ver como se habían desar-
rollado los demás defectos: los dedos tenían ventosas y eran delgados
como colas de calamar (¿o eran patas? Siempre dudaba de cómo llamar-
las)” (Enríquez 2016, p. 169). It is a no man’s land similar to Fanon’s
description of the colony: “The colonized’s sector, or at least the ‘native’
quarters, the shanty town, the Medina, the reservation, is a disreputable
place inhabited by disreputable people. You are born anywhere, anyhow.
You die anywhere, from anything. It’s a world with no space, people are
piled one on top of the other, the shacks squeezed tightly together. The
colonized’s sector is a famished sector, hungry for bread, meat, shoes,
and light. The colonized’s sector is a sector that crouches and cowers, a
sector on its knees, a sector that is prostate. It’s a sector of niggers, a sec-
tor of towelheads” (2004, pp. 4–5).
The villa embodies a geography of absence, a deserted town that
represents the other side of the planned and readable modern city. The
villa depicts what “comes after” modernity, trauma, and death. As stated
before, Enríquez represents the Latin American city as post-urban in the
sense that it rejects the order of urban planning, and the notion that the
city is a sovereign space representing the nation-state. What we see in
“Bajo el agua negra” it is a city existing on the margins of modernity,
in a world with no order, plagued by monsters. At the end of the story,
Marina sees an impossible vision of this city’s inhabitants: “Era una pro-
cesión. Una fila de gente que tocaba los tambores mugrientos, con sus
redoblantes tan ruidosos, encabezada por los chicos deformes con sus
brazos delgados y los dedos de molusco, seguida por las mujeres, la may-
oría gordas, con el cuerpo desfigurado de los alimentos casi únicamente a
base de carbohidratos” (Enríquez 2016, p. 172).
The monster acquires new meanings in this story. Monstrosity has
been associated with the imaginary order prior to the Symbolic where the
ego creates a relationship between the self and its reflected image. The
monster not only embodies this other order, but we can read the monster
from a biopolitics perspective, meaning that the monster shows a “politics
of life.” The monster is a political figure because it shows the different
attempts to control and regulate life (Giorgi 323–324). His body disrupts
the grammar of society. It is an ideological figure that embodies the rela-
tions of domination and narrates political truth. The monster is the ulti-
mate representation of an aesthetic threshold because it takes the borders
of fiction to an impossible place. As in the story, the monster embodies
the possibilities of destabilization that the uncanny poses. But as Giorgi
also reminds us, the monster is an ethical interpellation, a metaphor for
power that cannot be reduced to the order of reason.
The monsters in the story are those who, abandoned by the state, chal-
lenge a social order that has excluded them. The victim of police brutal-
ity, Emanuel, a being that is between life and death, becomes their object
of cult. Enríquez pairs the fantastic with a commentary on the lack of
social justice in contemporary Argentina. A land of monsters, a land of
half dead people, is the land that exists in the margins of the city but that,
from there, challenges to collapse social order, represented in the story
by the figure of the district attorney Marina. As in previous examples, the
uncanny is that which exists underneath the surface, in a parallel world, in
58 M. SIERRA
a post-urban space, “Bajo el agua negra,” always threatening to make the

rationality of the story and the rationality of the urban order collapse.3
Widening Distances: Fever Dream

Spectral presences disrupt and unsettle our senses of space. In the short
novel “Distancia de rescate” (“Fever Dream”) by Samanta Schweblin
(2015), we experience that sense of spatial dislocation from the very
beginning. The notion of “distance” is key in the story: it refers to the
distance established through the trip that Amanda takes with her daugh-
ter Nina to the countryside, leaving behind the city represented in the
novel as a safe refuge. Schweblin has talked about the influence of Rulfo
in “Distancia de rescate.” As in Rulfo’s work, the novel is based on a
reduction of the distance between life and death (Kolesnicov 2017),
while using two human-specters as narrators who tell the story through
dialogue, a detail that also resembles the structure of Rulfo’s Pedro
Páramo. There is also the psychological meaning of the expression “dis-
tancia de rescate,” as it represents the distance that makes the protag-
onist Amalia feel safe and in control of her daughter’s life. There is the
distance that opens up between the real and the fantastic and that chal-
lenges our perceptions as readers. One of the key narrative elements of
the story is the widening of that distance, making any sense of security
impossible both for the protagonist and the readers.
The novel takes place in what Yi Fu Tuan calls a “landscape of fear”
that refers to both Amalia’s psychological state, and to a tangible envi-
ronment, in this case, a menacing countryside being polluted by pesti-
cides (Tuan 2013, p. 53). Fear is at the center of the story, a fear that
becomes stronger due to the isolation of the protagonist. The novel is
structured as a dialogue between David, Carla’s son, who has undergone
a transformation and who apparently is possessed by somebody else’s
soul, and Amalia who, we later learn, is nearing death. Both David and
Amalia are human-specters as they exist between life and death. Kneeling
at the edge of her deathbed, David guides the narration with comments
and questions that he whispers on Amanda’s ears. The story starts in
media res:
Son como gusanos.

¿Qué tipo de gusanos?
Como gusanos, en todas partes.
El chico es el que habla, me dice las palabras al oído. Yo soy la que

pregunta.
¿Gusanos en el cuerpo?
Sí, en el cuerpo.
¿Gusanos de tierra?
No otro tipo de gusano
Está oscuro no puedo ver. Las sábanas son ásperas, se pliegan debajo
de mi cuerpo. No me puedo mover, digo.
Por los gusanos. Hay que ser paciente y esperar. Y mientras se espera hay
que encontrar el punto exacto en el que nacen los gusanos. (empha-
sis in the original; Schweblin 2015, p. 11)
Through David’s mother, Carla, we later find out that he had gotten
very sick after drinking polluted water from the river. She is able to save
his life thanks to the help of a strange woman, a curandera, through a
procedure she calls “a migration:” “Si mudábamos a tiempo el espíritu
de David a otro cuerpo, entonces parte de la intoxicación se iba también
con él. Dividida en dos cuerpos había chances de superarla. No era algo
seguro, pero a veces funcionaba” (2015, p. 27). Schweblin introduces
here the idea of the double: David looks like himself, but we are not
sure if he really is the same kid. As David’s soul migrates, he transforms
into a child whose monstrous presence menaces the safety of others. As
almost a specter, David is a character that moves in the story as if he was
a shadow: we only hear him talk when he whispers in Amanda’s ears, and
we barely see him. Besides Amanda, he has no interactions with any of
the characters. He is a strong force always menacing the characters; Carla
is terrified that he would hurt Nina. David is part of a group of mon-
strous children; other children having short appearances in the novel,
and who contribute to create the novel’s obscure atmosphere.4
Carla is obsessed with the idea that there is something malign in
David, and we can read David’s monstrosity as a projection of Carla’s
guilt for having allowed the “migration.” Her fears and obsessions are
what create tension in the story, whereas Amanda does not perceive any
problems with David: “Ahora que estás al sol, descubro algunas man-
chas en tu cuerpo que antes no había visto. Son sutiles, una cubre la
parte derecha de la frente y casi toda la boca, otras manchas te cubren
los brazos y una de las piernas. Te parecés a Carla y pienso que sin las
manchas hubieras sido un chico realmente lindo” (2015, p. 52). And it
is Amanda’s faulty perception of danger that later triggers the tragedy
60 M. SIERRA
that happens to her and her daughter when they get infected with pesti-
cides. Although a novel, the story flows with an intensity that resembles
a short story, the narrator constantly tensing different narrative threads.
This is how Schewblin conceives of her stories: “Para mí cualquier texto
está atado a una cosa material, que tiene que ver con la tensión como si
fuera un hilo. Una punta la tiene el escritor, la otra, el lector, y se está
tirando constantemente para un lado y para el otro de ese hilo. Y ese hilo
siempre tiene que estar tenso, no puede aflojarse y no puede romperse”
(Kolesnicov 2017).
There is another narrative element central to the story: the worms.
As we later learn, worms are symptoms of an illness that affects those
victims who are in contact with the pesticides that abound in the area.
But worms can also be interpreted as each of the different narrative
threads that are working in the novel, stories that emerge thanks to the
dialogue between David and Amalia. But David is the one who triggers
the tension by pulling the narrative thread in the direction that he wants
through the questions he poses to Amanda. David is in control of the
narrative whereas Amanda is trying to understand—through flashbacks—
what happened to her and her daughter. Amanda’s lack of knowledge is
what creates narrative tension in the novel, the worms being a metaphor
of the menace that threatens to surface at any moment. The novel is in
the hands of the specter, David, who is like a larva existing at the heart of
the narrative. As Blanco and Peeren state:
But there is also another type of spectrality that we may call larval, which
is born from not accepting its own condition, from forgetting so as to pre-
tend at all costs that it still has bodily weight and flesh. Such larval spect-
ers do not live alone but rather obstinately look for people who generated
them through their bad conscience. They live in them as nightmares, as
incubi or succubi, internally moving their lifeless members with strings
made of lies. (2013, p. 40)
As a larva, a worm, a human-specter, David, grows and feeds from

Amanda’s fears.
Worms are elements in the novel that trigger the fantastic, threaten-
ing Amanda’s sense of security. Like Enríquez, Schweblin pictures chil-
dren as the most vulnerable ones, showing the imperfections of an adult
world that disregards the value of life. In this novel, children transform
into specters thanks to the “migratory” experiment of the curandera.
Nina and David, acting like “larval specters” who disrupt the story,
threatening the boundary that separates life and dead. They are both
projections of their parents’ fears as they are located in the place of the
abject (González Dinamarca 2015, p. 98). In the novel, the relationship
between monstrosity and adulthood is represented by the figure of the
mother, a mother that fluctuates between guilt and fear. The monstrous
child is the consequence of an adult world that has been devastated
(González Dinamarca 2015, p. 103), in this case by pollution. We can
interpret the children’s possession not as a possession by an evil spirit,
but rather by the past of pollution and death that agricultural compa-
nies have left in sediments in fields and farms. Schweblin employs this
residue, this worm, as a fantastic element, a ghost that triggers surreal
elements in fiction.
Steven Pile states that ghosts manifest the emotional state of grief: they
represent both personal and social anxieties and traumas. The novel cre-
ates a phantasmagoric atmosphere, as Amanda is progressively less and
less able to see. The novel’s last images create the impression of a dream.
The town becomes the image of a haunted place: twenty eight graves that
appear at the side of the road, a procession of deformed children cross-
ing the street: “Son chicos extraños. Son, no sé, arde mucho. Chicos con
deformaciones. No tienen pestañas, ni cejas, la piel es colorada, muy colo-
rada, y escamosa también. Solo unos pocos son como vos” (Schweblin
2015, p. 108). As Pile states following Walter Benjamin, there are two
ways in which phantasmagories “make space” or exist in a natural spatial
form: nested in spatial scales for instance from body and home through
the transnational and the global; another is the creation of common-
place spaces in which phantasmagoric things are habitually housed. For
Benjamin, phantasmagories create an experience of dream-like and ghost-
like figures that resembles dreaming (Pile 2005, p. 165). Years and years
of pollution have devastated the area and, what we see in the novel are
the remains of that tragic past embodied in a phantasmagoric space. A
town of ghosts, that is, ghosts that carry a historical content, for the
specter is an intimately historical entity (Blanco and Peeren 2013, p. 38).
As in Enríquez’s fiction, Schweblin describes spatial relationships as
haunted, housing the ghosts from the past. Whereas in Enríquez the
stories center in marginal areas of Buenos Aires, Schweblin displaces her
narrative to a town in the countryside. They both explore the histori-
cal implications of the fantastic genre by pointing to the remains of a
traumatic past in places that house the phantasmagoric. Their narratives
occur in a non-place as defined by Marc Augé:
62 M. SIERRA
If a place can be defined as relational, historical, and concerned with iden-

tity then a space which cannot be defined as relational, historical or con-
cerned with identity will be a non-place. The hypothesis advanced here is
that supermodernity produced non-places, meaning spaces which are not
themselves anthropological places and which, unlike Baudelairean moder-
nity, do not integrate the earlier places: instead these are listed, classified,
promoted, to the status of “places of memory,” and assigned to a circum-
scribed and specific position. (1997, pp. 77–78)
In other words, the non-places of Enríquez and Schweblin erase the rela-
tional, historical, and identity markers to show instead, the place as an
absence, as a haunted presence, and a ghost of memory.
Conclusion: Spiderwebs
Non-places point to the absences of history, they whisper in our ears sto-
ries from the past, unresolved traumas and mysteries. The post-urban
spaces considered here show the fragility of social relationships, the con-
stant menace of dark social forces. Spectral geographies show the impos-
sibility of a sense of place, as defined by Augé, they are places of absences
and silences.
Avery Gordon describes the ghost as a social figure: “The ghost is
not simply a dead or a missing person, but a social figure, and investi-
gating it can lead to that dense site where history and subjectivity make
social life” (2008, p. 8). As we have seen in the stories discussed above,
spectral geographies have a relationship with social trauma; they point to
society’s lacks and anxieties, and they show in their narrative structure
the fractures and gaps of allegorical expression. What is significant is that
the stories by Enríquez and Schweblin narrate fictions that are like “spi-
derwebs,” tales that create a space where present and past, reality and
fiction, the living and the dead, coexist. These social spaces are similar
to the description of the oppressive environment of Northeast Argentina
that starts Enríquez’s story “Tela de araña” (“Spiderweb”): “Es más
difícil respirar en el norte húmedo, ahí tan cerca de Brasil y Paraguay,
con el río feroz custodiado por mosquitos y el cielo que pasa en minutos
de celeste límpido a negro tormenta. La dificultad se empieza a sentir
enseguida, ni bien se llega, como si un abrazo brutal encorsetara las cos-
tillas” (Enríquez 2016, p. 93). This is a perfect description of spectral
spaces, spaces that trapped us and create a web around us until we are
completely immersed in the strange world of the uncanny.
The fantastic stories by Enríquez and Schweblin describe an alternate
geography, a geography of darkness that engulfs the dreams of the mod-
ern city. Space adopts the form of a labyrinth, a rhizome that represents a
net of past and present relations; as Lauro Zavala states, such labyrinth is
the space of virtuality and, we can add, the space of the uncanny (2004,
p. 356). As readers, we are compelled to occupy this space, to become
inhabitants of such virtual and impossible worlds that, as Freud describes
well referring to the uncanny, are both different and the same to our tan-
gible reality.
Notes
1. Foucault has studied this idea: “A definite fear prevailed during the sec-
ond half of the eighteenth century: the fear of a dark space, of a screen of
obscurity obstructing the clear visibility of things, of people, of truths. It
became imperative to dissolve the elements of darkness that blocked the
light, demolish all of society’s somber spaces, those dark rooms where arbi-
trary political rule foments, as well as the whims of a monarch, religious
superstitions, tyrants’ and priests’ plots, illusions or ignorance and epidem-
ics. […] During the period of the Revolution, Gothic novels developed a
whole fanciful account of the high protective walls, darkness, the hide-outs
and dungeons that shield, in a significant complicity, robbers and aristo-
crats, monks and traitors” (Foucault 2008, pp. 12–13).
2. According to Tzvetan Todorov, the fantastic requires the fulfillment of
three conditions. First, the text must oblige the reader to consider the
world of the characters as a world of living persons and to hesitate between
a natural and supernatural explanation of the events described. Second,
this hesitation may also be experienced by a character; thus the reader’s
role is entrusted to a character: the hesitation is represented, it becomes
one of the themes of the work. Third, the reader must adopt a certain atti-
tude with regard to the text: he will reject allegorical as well as “poetic”
interpretations (Todorov 1973, p. 33). The “pure uncanny” or the “fan-
tastic uncanny” occurs when all three conditions are met, as it occurs in
Enríquez’s story.
3. While I will not offer extensive exploration of another story that has as
a protagonist a monster child, I would like to mention in passing, “An
Invocation of the Big-Eared Runt.” In this story there is an alternative
story of the city that is written by a tour guide that offers tours in Buenos
Aires. His tours center on horror stories in the city, and we can see this
64 M. SIERRA
example as the other side of the prideful Buenos Aires, a city that feels
proud of its culture and its European architecture. What Enríquez’s sto-
ries show us is the dark face of the modern dreams that built the “Paris of
South America.”
4. One example is the little girl they see at the grocery store: “La mujer
estira la mano hacia el otro pasillo y, cuando se da vuelta hacia nosotras,
una mano chiquita la acompaña. Una nena aparece lentamente. Pienso
que todavía está jugando, porque renguea tanto que parece un mono,
pero después veo que tiene una de las piernas muy corta, como si apenas
se extendiera por debajo de la rodilla, pero aún así tuviera un pie. Cuando
levanta la cabeza para mirarnos vemos la frente, una frente enorme que
ocupa más de la mitad de la cabeza” (Schewblin 2015, p. 42).
Bibliography
Augé, Marc. 1997. Non-Places. Introduction to an Anthropology of
Supermodernity. Translated by John Howe. London: Verso.
Avelar, Idelber. 1999. The Untimely Present. Postdictatorial Latin American
Fiction and the Task of Mourning. Durham: Duke University Press.
Blanco, Maria del Pilar, and Esther Peeren, eds. 2013. The Spectralities
Reader: Ghosts and Haunting in Contemporary Cultural Theory. London:
Bloomsbury.
Enríquez, Mariana. 2016. Las cosas que perdimos en el fuego. Barcelona: Editorial
Anagrama.
Fanon, Frantz. 2004. The Wretched of the Earth. Translated by Richard Phicox.
New York: Grove Press.
Foucault, Michel. 2008. “The Eye of Power.” In The Impossible Prison.
A Foucault Reader, edited by Daniel Defert, 8–15. Nothingham:
Nothingham Contemporary.
García Canclini, Néstor. 2005. Hybrid Cultures. Strategies for Entering and
Leaving Modernity. Translated by Christopher L. Chiappari and Silvia L.
López. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Giorgi, Gabriel. 2009. “Política del monstruo.” Revista Iberoamericana 75, no.
227: 323–329.
González Dinamarca, Rodrigo Ignacio. 2015. “Los niños monstruosos en
El orfanato de Juan Antonio Bayona y Distancia de rescate de Samanta
Schweblin.” Brumal 3, no. 2: 89–106.
Gordon, Avery F. 2008. Ghostly Matters. Haunting and the Sociological
Imagination. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Holloway, Julian and James Kneale. 2008. “Locating Haunting: A Ghost-
Hunter’s Guide.” Cultural Geographies 15: 297–312.
Jackson, Rosemary. 1995. Fantasy. The Literature of Subversion. London and

New York: Routledge.
Kolesnicov, Patricia and Samanta Schweblin. 2017. “Tirando del hilo de una buena
historia. Entrevista con Samanta Schweblin.” Clarín. Revista Ñ. 04/08/2017.
https://www.clarin.com/revista-enie/literatura/tirando-hilo-buena-historia_
0_HJJRpqkwW.html (accessed December 13, 2017).
Lefebvre, Henri. 1991. The Production of Space. Translated by Donald
Nicholson-Smith. Oxford, MA: Blackwell.
Levina, Marina, and Diem-My T. Bui. 2013. Monster Culture in the 21st Century.
A Reader. London: Bloomsbury.
Mbembe, Achille. 2011. Necropolítica seguido de Sobre el gobierno privado indi-
recto. Translated and edited by Elisabeth Falomir Archambault. Barcelona:
Melusina.
Todorov, Tzevetan. 1973. The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary
Genre. Translated by Richard Howard. London: Case Western Reserve
University.
Tuan, Yi-Fu. 2013. Landscapes of Fear. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press.
Pile, Steven. 2005. Modernity, Space and the Phantasmagorias of City Life.
London: Sage.
Schweblin, Samanta. 2015. Distancia de rescate, 2nd ed. Barcelona: Literatura
Random House.
Vidler, Antony. 1992. The Architectural Uncanny. Essays in the Modern
Unhomely. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Zavala, Lauro. 2004. “El humor como estrategia de escritura ante el laberinto
urbano.” In Las ciudades latinoamericanas en el nuevo (des)orden mundial,
edited by Patricio Nava and Marc Zimmerman, 353–373. México: Siglo XXI.
CHAPTER 4
A Tale of Three Cities: Urban Space

in the Crack Novels (1995–1997)
Tomás Regalado-López
In 1994, the Mexican writers Ricardo Chávez Castañeda, Ignacio

Padilla, Pedro Ángel Palou, Eloy Urroz and Jorge Volpi began a col-
lective project that they dubbed the Crack. The year is particularly sig-
nificant, for at that time Mexico City was suffering a crisis caused by
overpopulation, the failure of institutional organization and the col-
lapse of public infrastructures. Furthermore, the recently implemented
North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was already wreak-
ing havoc on the country’s social, political and economic dynamics.
On August 7, 1996, the aforementioned writers made their pub-
lic debut by reading the “Crack Manifesto.” In that document, and
in several of their novels that accompanied it, these young novelists
embraced an apocalyptic discourse that was part of a trend in Mexican
literature. Specifically, various works in multiple genres portrayed
Mexico City as a dystopian urban space, destroyed, uninhabitable
and quickly approaching a final cataclysm. Mexican writers imagined
a future megalopolis that suffered a magnified version of the crisis
T. Regalado-López (*) 
Department of Foreign Languages, Literatures and Cultures,
James Madison University, Harrisonburg, VA, USA

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-92438-0_4
68 T. REGALADO-LÓPEZ
of the mid-nineties, featuring issues like neoliberal policies, popula-

tion growth, environmental destruction, public insecurity and deci-
sive control of public opinion by the mass media. Using as a point of
departure essays that studied apocalyptic representation in end-of-the-
century Mexican and Latin American literature (Aínsa 2002; Muñoz
2003; Sánchez Prado 2007; Salvioni 2013; Ordiz 2014), this chap-
ter seeks to analyze the apocalyptic representation of urban space in
three Crack novels: Jorge Volpi’s La paz de los sepulcros (The Peace of
the Graves, 1995), Pedro Ángel Palou’s Memoria de los días (Memory
of the Days, 1995), and Ricardo Chávez Castañeda’s El día del hurón
(The Day of the Ferret, 1997). The essay will examine themes such as
the relationship between fictional and extra-fictional space, the influ-
ence of the media in the making of the urban discourse, the notion
of apocalypse in the Crack imaginary, and an extensive tradition in
Mexican literature that places Mexico City as a central space of its
literary production.
Mexico City underwent several urban transformations throughout the
twentieth century. Novelists reflected these changes, and the urban space
represented in fiction, as Fernando Aínsa affirmed, was “none other than
the consequence of the writer’s conflicted experience in the real city”
(2002, p. 36).1 Mexico’s capital has occupied a prominent place in nar-
rative since the 1940s, when Rodolfo Usigli depicted a city immersed
in the rapid and visible changes wrought by post-revolutionary moder-
nity in his novel Ensayo de un crimen (Rehearsal for a Crime, 1944).2
“A canvas that combines Dos Passos with Diego Rivera,” as Domínguez
Michael has said (1996, p. 16), La región más transparente (Where the
Air is Clear, 1958) by Carlos Fuentes is the canonical model for this rep-
resentation of urban space. Influenced by the fictitious New York City
in John Dos Passos’ Manhattan Transfer (1925), Fuentes fashioned
Mexico City as the main character with its mélange of people, places and
ethnicities. A few years later, narrative in the sixties reflected the dynamic
changes in Mexico City in novels such as Agustín Yáñez’s Ojerosa y pin-
tada (Tired and Made-Up, 1960), where the moving locus of a taxi
provides a view of the city (Alvarado 2017, p. 41); Fernando del Paso’s
José Trigo (1966), a novel described by Domínguez Michael as “a Berlin
Alexanderplatz in Mexico City” (1996, p. 523); Gustavo Sainz’s Gazapo
(The Rabbit, 1965) and José Agustín’s De perfil (On profile, 1966), as
well as the Onda novels, where the city was the nocturnal setting for the
teenagers’ adventures right before the generational tragedy of Tlatelolco
in 1968. In 1981 José Emilio Pacheco imagined a “Babylonian,
4 A TALE OF THREE CITIES: URBAN SPACE IN THE CRACK … 69
degraded, and miraculous” (Quirarte 2002, p. 314) Mexico City from

the perspective of a teenager in the Roma colonia or neighborhood in
Las batallas en el desierto (Battles in the Desert).
In the nineties, there were two main trends in this representation of
Mexico City. On one hand, the megalopolis was deliberately omitted
as a narrative space by writers who found other geographical spaces for
their fiction.3 An example of this trend is Una ciudad mejor que ésta.
Antología de nuevos narradores mexicanos (A Better City than this One.
An Anthology of New Mexican Narrators, 1999), a generational anthol-
ogy where Mexico City disappeared as a motif. David Miklós, the editor,
invited thirteen Mexican authors born in the 1960s to write a short story
set, in his own words, in “the cities and territories of their imagination,
a place distant from everyday life, with the aim of avoiding common
places and favoring creative fiction” (1999, p. 12). This process of spatial
reconfiguration in the Latin American narrative—called deterritorializa-
tion (Alvarado 2017), balkanization (Hubert 2012), or the emergence of
the peripheries (Becerra 2014)—gave way to an unexpected phenomenon.
On the one hand, Mexican young novelists did not write about the cap-
ital, and the most relevant novels about the city were written by foreign-
ers. This is the case of Los detectives salvajes (The Savage Detectives, 1998)
by Chilean Roberto Bolaño. Also, Mantra (2001), “one of the greatest
novels written about Mexico City at the beginning of the 21st century”
(Volpi 2009, p. 197), was actually penned by an Argentinean, Rodrigo
Fresán.4 On the other hand, writers fictionalized Mexico City from an
apocalyptic perspective, borrowing techniques from cinematography
and science fiction and imagined dystopian futures where the sprawling
city was on the edge of self-destruction. According to Fernando Aínsa,
“the city is the perfect space for a daily descent into a hell of anti-utopia”
(2002, p. 25) and “no Latin American capital offers a more apocalyptic
fictitious image than Mexico” (2002, p. 27). Rooted in Meso-American,
especially Aztec, beliefs and the Bible, apocalypse was repeatedly and
inextricably associated with the dystopian representation of the nation’s
capital in almost all genres of end-of-the-century Mexican literature.
Rather than relating these urban representations to the technological
abstraction of English language sci-fi, the Spanish critic Javier Ordiz has
noticed a social, political and humanistic questioning in these fictions.
He cited novels such as Carlos Fuentes’s Cristóbal Nonato (Christopher
Unborn, 1987), where Mexico City was sprayed by acid rain, and
Carmen Boullosa’s Cielos de la tierra (Skies of the Earth, 1997), where
the city’s inhabitants suffered a regression to a primitive state.5
Taking as a point of departure Lois Parkinson Zamora’s (1994)

Narrar el apocalipsis, critic Amanda Salvioni has identified a twofold
interpretation of these urban apocalyptic representations in end-of-the-
century Latin American fiction. On one hand, these approaches to apoc-
alypse can be explained from the perspective of the Western condition in
general, the collapse of modernity, a widespread postmodern skepticism,
and the rupture of existing forms of thought. In Salvioni’s words, they
are the consequence “of the symbolic tensions of postmodernism that
Latin American writers have to endure at the end of the millennium”
(2013, p. 304), and “the uncertain limits of philosophy and history,
and the questioning of this ‘sense of ending’” (2013, p. 304). On the
other hand, Latin American writers reacted to the failure occasioned by
the implementation of neoliberal policies in their countries: the expan-
sion of capitalism, the loss of a national identity, and the displacement of
local powers in favor of corporate interests. In her own words, “the Latin
American apocalyptic narrative [can be] understood as a manifestation
of a social critique focused on the failure of the capitalistic and industrial
model, openly implemented in Latin American societies and radicalized
by neoliberal policies in the nineties” (2013, p. 305). Salvioni identifies
post-NAFTA Mexico as paradigmatic of the second type of imagined
apocalypse (2013, p. 304). Three critics studied these apocalyptic rep-
resentations with a focus on Mexican literature. In his essay “La utopía
apocalíptica del México neoliberal” (“Apocalyptic Utopia in Neoliberal
Mexico”), Ignacio Sánchez Prado approached this urban apocalypse in
poetry, cinematography, chronicle and fiction, as imagined recreations
of an “apocalyptic utopia” (2007, p. 10). According to Sánchez Prado,
these depictions figure as the writers’ reactions against the failures in the
official discourse of Mexican modernity, against the neoliberal hegemonic
discourse, and against the capitalist invasion that accompanied NAFTA.
Even in different genres and from different perspectives, Mexican writers
and artists agreed on “the use of literature and the apocalypse as forms
of dismantling nationalism and neoliberalism” (2007, p. 14), on the rep-
resentation of a “utopia aimed at the deconfiguration of the ideological
systems of modernity” (2007, p. 12), and on a “deep criticism of the
myths of national modernity from an apocalyptic imaginary that pushes
to the limit neoliberalism and nationalistic ideology” (2007, p. 12).
Included in Sánchez Prado’s bibliography, Boris Muñoz’s essay “La
ciudad de México en la imaginación apocalíptica” (“Mexico City in
the Apocalyptic Imagination”) studied the apocalyptic approach to the
Mexican capital in four chronicles by Juan Villoro, Elena Poniatowska,
Carlos Monsiváis, and José Joaquín Blanco. He defined it as a literary

trend that “usually manifests itself with greater profusion and strength in
periods of danger or social crisis” (2003, p. 77). Muñoz explains the apoc-
alyptic representation of Mexico City as a result of the tension between
an asphyxiating present and an imagined grotesque future, where cur-
rent problems are portrayed hyperbolically to depict an urban landscape
on the verge of destruction. According to Muñoz, “the apocalyptic genre
works as a narrative discourse that elaborates the omens of a threatening
and sinister future based on current upheavals” (2003, p. 77), giving way
to “a prophetic writing that foresees a possible future for the city” (2003,
p. 84). Muñoz adds three elements that characterize this apocalyptic rep-
resentation of the city. First, the destruction of the environment, since “it
is not surprising to find that an important part of contemporary literature
deals with the fear of a poisoned environment” (2003, p. 89). Second,
the omnipotence of the media in the fabrication of truths. Third, the dis-
placement of public space into private hands, because “space passed from
national hands to those of transnational capitalism” (2003, p. 88). In his
article, Javier Ordiz places these texts in the genre of “apocalyptic dys-
topias” or “projective literature,” a narrative subgenre of science-fiction,
where future representations of Mexico City are based on the actual prob-
lems that the capital and the country lived through in the mid-nineties.
Ordiz considers this literature “a particular typology of the [dystopian]
subgenre whose main extra-textual reference is the situation experienced
in Mexico during these past decades” (2014, p. 1047). The essays by
Muñoz, Ordiz, and Sánchez Prado have in common the direct relation
between these fictitious urban-apocalyptic representations and the circum-
stances suffered in the mid-1990s by the Mexican nation and its capital.
NAFTA, the deep economic crisis, the devaluation of the local currency
(the so-called Tequila Effect), the political crisis during Carlos Salinas de
Gortari’s last year of presidency, the Zapatista rebellion in Chiapas, and
the implementation of savage neoliberal policies rendered 1994 one of the
most horrible years in Mexico’s recent history. As Muñoz concludes, “if
the city is a sick, miserable and disgusting space, it is precisely because of
progress and capitalism” (2003, p. 88).
Memoría de los días, La paz de los sepulcros and El día del hurón, three
of the Crack novels published between 1995 and 1997, belong to this
apocalyptic trend set in urban spaces. The plot of each novel unfolds
in an overcrowded city in the midst of a social crisis, where the ruling
classes have failed in their attempt to impose social order, and where the
discourse in mass media caters to the economic and political hegemonic
powers. The representation of space and the idea of apocalypse, two

recurrent notions in the Crack group’s essays and manifestos, offer a
theoretical background for the study of urban space in these three nov-
els. Regarding the first point, the treatment of space in Crack novels has
sparked much discussion after two widely recognized works by mem-
bers of the group, En busca de Klingsor (In Search of Klingsor, 1999) by
Jorge Volpi, and Amphitryon (Shadow without a Name, 2000) by Ignacio
Padilla, were not set in a recognizable Mexican or Latin American space.
This feature led to a debate between localism and cosmopolitanism that
recalled nineteenth century discussions surrounding Latin American
literature.6 Three manifestos define the group’s identity, “Manifiesto
Crack,” Crack. Instrucciones de uso (Crack. A User’s Manual, 2004)
and the “Postmanifiesto del Crack, 1996–2016” (“Crack Postmanifesto
1996–2016,” 2015). In them, the Crack writers advocated for the free-
dom of any Mexican or other Latin American writer to set their plots in
any geographical or urban space, without constraints in terms of nation-
alist ideals, editorial policies, or political commitment. In the 1996 mani-
festo, Ignacio Padilla defined the zero chronotope as one of the defining
traits in the Crack’s literature: “what Crack novels seek to achieve are
stories whose chronotope, in Bakhtinian terms, is zero; no place and
no time, all times and places, and none” (Chávez et al. 2007, p. 169).
In contrast with the geographical axes of other trends in Mexican nar-
rative during the nineties (magical realism, la narrativa del norte, rural
writers dependent on Rulfo’s heritage, and the so-called trash literature
or literatura basura), the Crack writers adopted the cosmopolitan dis-
course of earlier Mexican groups (Contemporáneos in the twenties, and
the Generación de Medio Siglo in the fifties and sixties), arguing for geo-
graphical dislocation. In Padilla’s words, “dislocation in these Crack
novels will be, in the long run, simply the imitation of a crazed, dislo-
cated reality, the product of a world whose mass-mediatization has
brought it to the end of a century that is truncated in both time and
place, broken by an excess of ligaments” (Chávez et al. 2007, p. 169).
Mikhail Bakhtin introduced the term chronotope: “the essential connec-
tion of time and space relationships assimilated artistically in literature”
(Bajtin 2001, p. 63), and “a category of form and content in literature”
(2001, p. 63). This idea of the Russian theorist inspired Padilla to coin
the term zero chronotope, which he later identified with comic aes-
thetics, an artistic genre which, in his own words, “creates worlds that
are not identifiable anywhere or anytime, worlds that at the same time
can be located in all places and all times” (Carrera and Keizman 2001,
pp. 141–142). At a spatial level, Crack writers denied longstanding
tropes in Latin American literature such as local color, patriotic identity,
magical realism, nationalism and rural environments. This new paradigm
in the geographical reconfiguration of narrative space linked the Mexican
group with other trends in Latin American literature in the nineties, such
as the anthology McOndo by Alberto Fuguet and Sergio Gómez, also
published in 1996. Years later, Volpi stated in Crack. Instrucciones de uso
that “Crack members have the right—like any writer in the world—to
locate the action of their novels in the space they prefer” (Chávez et al.
2004, p. 183), adding ironically that “the only forbidden narrative space
for the Crack novelists are Comala and Macondo, except in those cases
of extreme urgency” (Chávez et al. 2004, p. 184). The group’s novels
in the years surrounding the “Manifiesto Crack” reflect the writer’s free-
dom to choose the narrative space, being the apocalyptic representation
of Mexico City a non-prescriptive spatial configuration.7
The apocalyptic line was one of the themes in the “Crack Manifesto.”
In the last chapter, “¿Dónde quedó el fin del mundo?” (“What Became
of the End of the World?”), Volpi defined the concept using as a point of
departure Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Antichrist (1895), writing “apoca-
lypse” where the German philosopher had written “kingdom of heaven,”
because “they [the characters in the Crack novels] lack the fortitude and
bravery to realize, paraphrasing Nietzsche, that the end of days does not
occur beyond the world, but rather within the human heart” (Chávez
et al. 2007, p. 173).8 Later Volpi elaborates on the apocalypse as an inti-
mate experience, rather than a cinematographic destruction: “more than
a decimal superstition or a market necessity, the end of the world presup-
poses a particular spiritual condition; what matters least is the external
destruction, compared with internal collapse, with that state of anguish
that precedes our personal Judgment Day” (Chávez et al. 2007, p. 173).
However, the Nietzschean rhetoric does not prevent the Crack writers
from interpreting apocalypse in the atmosphere of skepticism, decep-
tion, and hopelessness associated with the burial of utopias and with
the Mexican crisis in the mid-nineties. On the one hand, in an interview
published on July 7, 1996, one month before the reading of the “Crack
Manifesto,” Volpi stated that the Crack novels “use the onomatopoeia
to refer to the financial crack, the crack in the stock market, and the
collapse of all the established values before the end of the millennium”
(Castro 1996, p. 55). On the other hand, in the “Postmanifiesto del
Crack, 1996–2016,” these writers also identified the events of 1994 as
the generational trauma that gave unity to their configuration as a group:
It is the winter of 1994, and the PRI [Partido Revolucionario Institucional]

has once again won the elections. It is the end of a year full of astonishment
and catastrophe: the Zapatista uprising and the assassination of the presi-
dential candidate. If the 5 [Crack novelists] tremble, it has nothing to do
with the cold December air, rather it is due to the political and economic
debacle of a country alienated by the crisis. (Chávez et al. 2015, p. 356)
This debacle is allegorically portrayed in Volpi’s La paz de los sepulcros,

the first Crack novel to reflect this urban apocalypse. Volpi’s imagined
city has numerous points in common with Mexico City at the time.
Though never called by its name, the fictitious city is divided into rep-
resentative neighborhoods or colonias easily recognizable as belonging
to the capital, such as Roma (1995, p. 135), Nezahualcóyotl (131),
Pantitlán (146), and San Ángel (146; 220). The plot also takes place in
specific places like the Periférico beltway (146), the Cementerio Inglés
(43; 85), the Los Pinos presidential residence (141), and “un hotel en
la salida de Cuernavaca” (56). The infrastructure problems that threaten
the fictitious urban space also reflect the daily problems of Mexico City
in the mid-1990s: pollution—it is described as a city of “brumas artifi-
ciales” (1995, p. 104)—the collapse of the urban transportation system,
poverty and class difference, because at night one could see “el simple
pulular, lento y salvaje, de mendigos, profetas y desheredados” (1995,
p. 104). It also portrays garbage accumulation; and citizen insecurity,
with recurrent “homicidios, fragores y violencias” (1995, p. 104). In
certain chapters, Volpi resorts to sheer hyperbole: his Mexico City has
“cientos de rascacielos” (1995, p. 104), and a population that doubles
that of the actual city in the mid-nineties, transformed into a “megalópo-
lis de cuarenta millones de habitantes, con el esplendor de sus periféricos
atestados durante el día—infinitas filas de hormigas muertas—, sus cien-
tos de rascacielos desgarrados, su energía y su basura y sus incognoscibles
destinos; esta ciudad de baches y gozosos insultos…” (1995, p. 104).9
The city shares with its inhabitants an illuminated face during the day—
with occasional glimpses of urban organization—and a dark face at night
where the worst crimes, the most perverse abjections, and the most basic
instincts govern the lives of the political class that rules the country. The
contrasts between light and darkness denote allegorical dichotomies
between the public and the private, reason and instinct, honesty and cor-
ruption, life and death, and they are particularly intense in the nocturnal
description of the Plaza del Zócalo, Mexico City’s main square, the space
where all the historical pasts and critical presents are condensed:
La catedral parecía una nave espacial inmensa desde que le colocaron las
flores fluorescentes: entonces era un monstruo marino saliendo a flote
desde las profundidades de la noche del Zócalo, una ballena multicolor en
medio de la negrura de sus piedras, los focos permanentemente apagados de
Palacio Nacional y los edificios que la circundaban, la plaza vacía e inmóvil
cada noche […] El asta [de la] bandera permanecía invisible, opaca, mien-
tras los últimos automóviles huían ferozmente hacia sus casas o se refugia-
ban en los estacionamientos de bares y restaurantes. (1995, pp. 138–139)
Rather than an apocalypse, the description of Mexico City in La paz

de los sepulcros reveals certain parallels with the post-apocalyptic descrip-
tion of Mexico City in Carlos Monsiváis’s chronicle Los rituales del caos
(The Rituals of Chaos, 1995). According to Monsiváis, the apocalypse
had already occurred in Mexico City, and its inhabitants, described as
organizers of chaos and radical optimists, found ways to accommodate
themselves to the apocalypse they suffer every day because, “in the long
run, its advantages seem to be worthwhile when compared to horror.
And this is the result: Mexico, a post-apocalyptic city” (1995, p. 21).
According to Monsiváis, in Mexico City “the worst thing already hap-
pened (and the worst thing is the monstrous population that never ceases
to grow)” (1995, p. 21), the city “works in ways that most of its inhab-
itants cannot explain” (21), and in this urban atmosphere “each one is
able to find in chaos the rewards that somehow balance the sensations of
an unlivable life” (21).
There is certainly a link between the apocalypse narrated by Volpi in
La paz de los sepulcros and the socio-political situation of Mexico in the
mid-nineties. In his essay “The Novels of Jorge Volpi and the Possibility
of Knowledge,” Danny J. Anderson compared La paz de los sepulcros with
contemporary novels like El sitio (The Siege, 1998) by Ignacio Solares,
Santa María del Circo (Saint Mary of the Circus, 1998) by David Toscana,
and El temperamento melancólico (The Melancholic Temperament, 1995)
by Volpi himself, novels that use apocalypse as a representation of the
failure of community life in Mexico City. According to this critic, they are
novels that “express socio-political frustration and delve into apocalyptic
themes self-consciously associated with the end of the millennium” (2000,
p. 10), and they also “indicate a larger social phenomenon of disenchant-
ment with the unpredictable circumstances of collective life in Mexico”
(2000, p. 10). Oswaldo Zavala assigned La paz del sepulcros to two novel
genres that would seem mutually exclusive: historical and futurist. He
mentioned the former because it offered “a historical account of end-of-
the-century events that correspond to many aspects of recent Mexican his-
tory” (2004, p. 346). He included the latter because the novel acquired
a second level of historicity, “an unforeseen future” (2004, p. 353)
granted by the political events in the year 2000, five years after its publica-
tion, when Vicente Fox and the Partido de Acción Nacional (PAN) won
the elections and put an end to the seventy-one-year rule of the Partido
Revolucionario Institucional (PRI). In 1994, Volpi served as the secre-
tary of Diego Valadés, the Attorney General of the Mexican Republic,
and it was with some insight that he defined La paz de los sepulcros as the
“reflection of the decadent atmosphere that Mexico was living through”
(Carrera and Keizman 2001, p. 252).
Indeed, La paz de los sepulcros warrants a third generic label, for it is
also closely related to one of the most important political novels in
Mexican tradition, La sombra del caudillo (The Shadow of the Caudillo,
1928) by Martín Luis Guzmán. Volpi adapts Guzmán’s allegorical tech-
niques (like the metaphorical use of light and darkness) to the political
circumstances in Mexico during the mid-nineties, with the aim of fic-
tionalizing and deconstructing the national events of 1994 from the cen-
tral perspective of Mexico City. Among them are the Zapatista uprising
in Chiapas—the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) guer-
rilla movement has an urban counterpart in the novel, simply known as
the FPLN—and the assassination of presidential candidate Luis Donaldo
Colosio on March 23, metaphorized in the figure of Alberto Navarro,
Minister of Justice, whose corpse is found in the room of a highway motel
in the opening scene of Volpi’s novel. Although minimally allegorized,
the political events narrated correspond to the post-NAFTA social and
political reality in Mexico, including political assassination, widespread
corruption, the unprecedented economic crisis and the institutional fail-
ure to maintain social order (Urroz 2000, pp. 145–187; Zavala 2004,
pp. 345–354; Regalado 2006, pp. 41–49). At the end of the novel, the
narrator, a journalist named Agustín Oropeza who works for the tab-
loid paper Tribuna del escándalo, has been co-opted by the government,
which awards him the National Journalism Prize for supporting the offi-
cial truth, thus hiding the facts of his journalistic research that contradicts
the government’s discourse about the events that happen every day in
the city. What Volpi narrates, then, is a political apocalypse: the novelist
is interested in Mexico City as the scene of the power struggles, the plots
of corruption, and the arbitrary way the nation is governed. The urban
inhabitants in La paz de los sepulcros constitute an anonymous multimil-
lion-strong mass, oblivious to actual political destinies and obedient to the
truths fabricated by the mass media. Closer to the second type of apoc-
alypse described by Salvioni—the representation of a social and political
apocalypse after the failure of the neoliberal policies implemented across
Latin America—the city in La paz de los sepulcros is, citing Boris Muñoz,
“the space where the modern capitalist state explicitly collapses, revealing
the total absence of power of the citizens” (2013, p. 76).
In Monsiváis’s Los rituales del caos and Volpi’s La paz de los sepulcros
the post-apocalyptic chaos paradoxically guarantees the daily survival of
the city, being the raison d’être of urban dynamics. In Memoria de los
días, on the contrary, Palou imagines a catastrophic Mexico City that
already stopped working and is about to disappear. Only a few inhabit-
ants remain, and the whole area is on the verge of extinction.The pop-
ulation of Palou’s imagined city reached “ochenta millones” (1995,
p. 23) but two years later, when the narration begins, the destruction
of the ozone layer caused an epidemic of skin cancer, killing most of the
population and forcing the rest to abandon the city.10 Under these cir-
cumstances, the Church of the Peace of the Lord begins a pilgrimage
to Los Angeles to proclaim the end times. The pilgrims include char-
acters like a healer, an alchemist, a court of dwarves, a priest (who also
performs as a Mexican wrestler), and two outstanding characters, María
Guadalupe, an incarnation of Virgin Mary, and Dionisio Estupiñán, an
alcoholic self-proclaimed grandson of the Redeemer, a role which mir-
rors Matamoros Moreno, the religious ayatollah in Fuentes’s Cristóbal
Nonato (Ordiz 2014). At the beginning of the novel Dionisio leaves
Mexico City in a bus, and the narrator describes the urban space in the
following terms:
La ciudad de México es un queso gruyère: los edificios abandonados desde

hace dos años, con los vidrios rotos y las paredes agrietadas, se apiñan
inútiles como recuerdo de una época ya olvidada […] Puedo, por qué no,
referirles aquella tarde en que [Dionisio] caminó por la Alameda, rodeando
el Hemiciclo a Juárez, para constatar que alguien había removido los cadá-
veres del último verano, y que anduvo como un sonámbulo por las calles
del centro, por el barrio chino, por el Zócalo. Es más, puedo decirles que
entró a Palacio Nacional y fue a sentarse en una polvosa silla presidencial,
apartando las ratas. (Palou 1995, pp. 22–23)
Palou explicitly identifies the fictitious megalopolis with Mexico City,

and he also describes well-known urban landmarks like the Zócalo, the
National Palace, the Alameda Park and the Juárez Hemicycle. As a sym-
bol of the decadence in the national discourse, all the historical symbols
were destroyed and turned into shelters for wild animals. Unlike Volpi’s
political apocalypse, Palou’s version is essentially environmental: capital-
ist industrialism destroyed the ozone layer, and ecological damage ren-
dered urban life unhealthy, causing the extinction of Mexico City. Critics
described the environmental catastrophe as a recurring generic theme
in these apocalyptic dystopias, often linked in Mexican literature to the
implementation of NAFTA policies and the construction of maquilas
or mega-factories all over the country. Muñoz states that “the imagina-
tion of disaster is not only triggered by a high-intensity event such as
an earthquake or a flood, but also, to a larger extent, by corrupt and
anti-ecological strategies of modernization and development” (2003,
p. 85). Ordiz (2014) describes similar environmental crises in other dys-
topian contemporary novels, such as the acid rain in Fuentes’s Cristóbal
Nonato, and the dark smog clouds that covers Mexico City in El dedo
de oro (The Golden Finger, 1996) by Guillermo Sheridan, as well as La
leyenda de los soles (The Legend of the Suns, 1993) by Homero Aridjis.
However, Palou does not limit his apocalyptic description to the envi-
ronmental damage in Mexico but broadens the scope to include a social,
economic, and ecological apocalypse that affects the entire planet. At the
end of the novel, several sectarians reach Los Angeles, where they con-
firm the demise of the capitalist model. Like Mexico City, the American
megalopolis is almost empty, and the capitalist system has collapsed.
As one character points out, “ya no existen ciudades llenas de gente,
porque no hay gente” (Palou 1995, p. 227), and “ya no existen grandes
potencias, porque no hay dinero. En lugar del poder, de la producción,

del no terminar nunca de ganar y ganar está la miseria, el hambre, la
enfermedad” (1995, p. 227). Mexico City is a microcosm of a univer-
sal destruction that engulfs humanity because, according to the narrator,
“algo está pasando con un planeta devastado por los miles de fenómenos
desatados contra sí mismo. La glaciación de Europa. Los años de las
migraciones, ya todos sin árboles, sin raíces, sin ningún lugar de donde
ser, de donde existir” (1995, p. 256). There is only one possible conclu-
sion: “nada más sobre la tierra que unos cuantos hombres esperando el
colapsamiento final” (1995, p. 256).
The description of the apocalypse in Memoria de los días includes two
more recurrent traits typical of these urban dystopias. First, the crisis favors
the emergence of sects, and fake “opportunist leaders who are seen by the
people as a sort of ‘redeemers,’ they believe in their slogans and promises”
(Ordiz 2014). There is an actual link, then, between the representation of
the apocalypse and the invention of groups that try to impose new rules
in community life, given the institutional lack of authority. At another
level, in his approach to Memoria de los días, Sánchez Prado understood
the leaders’ fanatic party line as a strategy to dismantle a nationalistic dis-
course, considering it “a dark iconology, based on the Catemaco’s sha-
manism, that is juxtaposed with irony to imagine a space of liberation in
the midst of disaster” (2007, p. 11). A second apocalyptic theme is media
manipulation. According to Muñoz, there is “a new process that gradually
replaces the traditional mechanisms of political and economic control by
others, such as the consumer networks and the culture of entertainment”
(2003, p. 84). In Memoria de los días the sect dissolves in the city of Los
Angeles, paradigm of the end-of-the-century capitalism, the corporation’s
profit and the entertainment industry. The sect proclaims the apparition
of the Virgin but the revelation becomes a primetime media show, inter-
rupted by a sniper who emerges from the crowd, kills several sectarians
and looks for shelter in a building that ends up burning. The scene is
broadcast live for hundreds of thousands of spectators (2003, p. 274). It is
the end of the journey that initiated in an apocalyptic Mexico City, the end
of the sect and, within the allegorical fictitious scheme, the spiritual, mate-
rial and physical end of humanity, caused by the end-of-the-century crisis
of values and, at a local level, the ecological damage and the expansion of
aggressive neoliberal capitalism in Mexico.
El día del hurón by Ricardo Chávez Castañeda, the third Crack novel
in narrating this urban apocalypse, describes a dystopia that takes place
in the imagined city of Zagarra, where all kinds of crimes and threats
against personal security occur: epidemics, robberies, explosions, mur-
ders of pregnant women, prostitution, begging and the theft of babies
(1997, p. 30). Chávez Castañeda’s city is divided into two moieties, the
wealthy neighborhoods and the low-income areas, separated by a sym-
bolic line, a white river made of toxic waste that functions metaphori-
cally as a social, economic and anti-ecological border between the two
sections. On the one hand, “Zagarra alta” (1997, p. 26) or Upper
Zagarra is divided into four hierarchically settled districts (Palisades,
Villela, Apiza, and Temple). It is described in terms of urban organi-
zation—“frías casonas y un crucigrama de avenidas desiertas” (1997,
p. 25)—and was founded thanks to the wealthy position of its inhabit-
ants, when “los ricos perdieron el centro ante la crecida de miseria y se
construyeron su propio suburbio en la montaña que se levanta al norte”
(25). On the other hand, there is Zagarra baja or Lower Zagarra, the
city below, defined as “la misma Zagarra pero muchos metros más al
fondo” (26). In contrast with Upper Zagarra, Lower Zagarra grew spon-
taneously without urban planning, and its description emphasizes chaos
and disorganization. It was built once an overflow “se tragó a la mayor
parte de la población” (26), its square “no es sino el yermo que dejó
una de las primeras bombas,” (27) and some citizens live in a shed “que
se levantó a propósito [después de una explosión], en una noche, con
la promesa increíble de ser transitoria” (27). Lower Zagarra is an une-
ven “laberinto de callejuelas” (28) without electric light, with streets that
“semejan corredores, algunos tan flacos que los muros se comban hacia
dentro” (27), and there is no personal security, to the extent that “nadie
se arriesga a llevar su auto al centro” (26). Remarkably, Lower Zagarra
has a lower level, a subspace that radiates negative energies, and a con-
centration of human degeneration. It is called Lafaveiga, a zero chrono-
tope impregnated with filth, destruction and horror, an unlivable area
that breaks the traditional dichotomy between barbarism and civilization:
[Lafaveiga] está construida a una distancia considerable de todo y de todos.

Allí se guarda nuestra vergüenza, un caldo de hambre, crimen y porquería;
sin paradas de tren ni una calle asfaltada para llegar […] Uno conoce: ham-
bre, crimen, porquería. Pero ésas son sólo palabras. Las palabras son buen
refugio. En Lafaveiga se cometen los crímenes más horribles y surgen,
como ahora, enfermedades de las que nunca se oye hablar. (33)
Like in La paz de los sepulcros, there is a symbiosis between the city and
its inhabitants. For example, the murderer Rosas Palazán, an outsider vis-
iting the city, is immediately drenched by this physical and metaphorical
decomposition. In his own opinion, “la ciudad es estúpida con esas calle-
juelas que sisean y de pronto, en una doblez, se consumen convertidas en
una azotea que se corta con violencia a tres metros de otro suelo” (46).
Consequently, “la ciudad y él mismo se le están volviendo intolerables
porque presiente un contagio de estupidez” (46). However, Zagarra’s
apocalyptic chaos is not total, opening the hypothesis of the narration of
a post-apocalypsis, in Monsiváis’s terms, rather than the almost absolute
apocalypse narrated in Memoria de los días. In the contrast between chaos
and hope that defines Chávez Castañeda’s fiction, there are also signs of
civilization. Upper Zagarra survives as an urban utopia, there are maps of
most areas in the city, the narrator speaks about the city founders (26),
and the transportation system seems to work fairly well. The airport oper-
ates without issues, there is a taxi service, trams work fluently, and there
is even a subway train that effectively joins distant areas of Zagarra (27).
It is true that much of the violence that affects Zagarra is comparable
to the violence suffered by many a Latin American megalopolis, exposed
to a neoliberal invasion at the end of the twentieth century. The fictitious
city is the public space for homicides, personal insecurity, robberies, pros-
titution and, as an explicit example of what theorists call urban segrega-
tion, a clear distinction of socially inclusive and socially exclusive zones,
what Michael Humphrey called “the spatializing of security” (2013,
p. 1) and “the risk management of dangerous urban spaces through
repression” (1).11 However, the representation of urban space in El día
del hurón is different from the one in La paz de los sepulcros and Memoria
de los días. As Sánchez Prado decisively points out, there are no direct
references between the extra-fictional reality in Mexico City and the city
imagined by Chávez Castañeda, nor are there recognizable geographical
references, as in Volpi’s and Palou’s novels (2017, p. 171). On the con-
trary, Sánchez Prado found in Zagarra a “radical ahistoricity of its literary
topoi” (2017, p. 172) and, against the opinion of Kristina Puotkalyte-
Gurgel—who suggested an allegorical reading of the novel from the
perspective of the end-of-the-century Mexican crisis—he convincingly
argued that “it is tempting to read El día del hurón as a fiction that seeks
to cognitively map contemporaneity, as many science-fictional works
do” (2017, p. 172), but that Chávez Castañeda resists “clear historicity”
(2017, p. 172) by not identifying Zagarra with Mexico City or with any
other recognizable place. Sánchez Prado considers El día del hurón is “a
very cinematographic novel” (2017, p. 170), and he suggests a reading

of it from the perspectives of the noir and science-fiction genres. In an
interview, Chávez Castañeda confirms the critic’s approach and he defines
El día del hurón as a novel closer to “public approaches, to the mystery
genre, easier to market. It sells better as a story, it is easier to market, it is
more cinematographic” (Regalado 2018, p. 216). The writer’s intention
was, in his own words, to emphasize “the strong influence of TV shows.
Now the Internet, but then I wanted to emphasize the importance of tel-
evision” (2018, p. 216).
Ordiz identified the media’s control over population as one of the traits
in these apocalyptic dystopian novels. According to the Spanish critic,
“newspapers, radios and televisions aim to convince the crowds with a
cause,” and this genre portrays media enterprises that “are not inde-
pendent anymore, but rather an effective tool of manipulation” (2014,
p. 1050). According to Boris Muñoz, the apocalyptic city is also organized
following “the complex cultural patterns dictated by the cultural industry
and the mass media” (2003, p. 84) and, consequently, “the city stands out
as the place where mass media interact with individuals” (2003, p. 84).
One of the main characters in El día del hurón is called El Verdugo. He is
a media star who speaks from a huge antenna that dominates the city. He
hosts a show that is “una mezcla de todo: amarillismo, denuncia, concurso
y juego” (Chávez 1997, p. 60), and he instills fear in the population by
proclaiming a collective apocalypse that will take place at the día del hurón
or the Day of the Ferret. The narrator considers the Day of the Ferret a
media maneuver, and he assumes that “el manejo de la información, en
cualquiera de sus modalidades, es un negocio. El enriquecimiento proviene
de la publicidad y para difundir la publicidad hay que vender el escándalo
y el sensacionalismo” (Chávez 1997, p. 72). The interpretation of this
mass media apocalypse also affects the narrative technique: as the plot
advances, narration shifts from the characters’ perspective to what citizens
see in their TV screens. At the end of the novel, urban space in El día del
hurón only exists as a mediated space, and all the citizens consider the TV
screen “un espejo de feria que les devuelve imágenes que se ocuparon de
ocultar bajo polvos y plisados” (Chávez 1997, p. 137). Like the scientific
experiments with rats at the zoo (Chávez 1997, p. 68), the Day of the
Ferret exemplifies a fictitious simulation. It is defined as “un desorden con-
trolado; una mezcla de normas invertidas” (Chávez 1997, p. 117), and a
state of exception. Like La Compañía in Borges’s short-story “La lotería
en Babilonia” (“The Lottery in Babylonia,” 1944), the Day of the Ferret
is organized by a higher instance power seen by citizens, and its only
public evidence is the Verdugo’s show. When the whole city is interested,
the show becomes a significant part of urban life (Chávez 1997, p. 64)
because, according to El Verdugo, “una ciudad humillada es una tragedia
y en la tragedia nadie se rebela contra su destino” (Chávez 1997, p. 140).
The novel ends right before the Day of the Ferret, and the foreseen urban
apocalypse is only suggested.12 Overall, the novel alerts against the power
of media enterprises and the decisive influence on urban community life.
In the mid-1990s, a group of Crack novels reflected urban spaces
from an apocalyptic perspective. They inherited traces of a long Mexican
tradition that linked the country’s literature with representations of its
capital city. In the nineties, the Crack group did not reject this millennial
apocalyptic discourse. It also occupied a chapter in its foundational text,
the “Crack Manifesto,” and it was one of the thematic line in three nov-
els written by the group between 1995 and 1997. La paz de los sepulcros,
Memoria de los días, and El día del hurón narrated apocalyptic dystopias
where urban space, on the verge of extinction, is affected by the prob-
lems that plagued many Latin American megacities at the time, such as
ecological catastrophe, the collapse of the social system, the hegemonic
control of media powers, an institutional crisis and, above all, an urgent
problem of overpopulation. Halfway between a universal apocalypse—
caused by postmodern skepticism—and an apocalypse related to the
Mexican social and political circumstances in the nineties—the immedi-
ate effects of oppressive neoliberal policies in post-NAFTA’s Mexico—
Volpi, Palou and Chávez Castañeda offered different versions of this
urban apocalypse. In La paz del sepulcros, the city suffers its daily
post-apocalypsis, identified with the perspective of the political crisis dur-
ing the annus horribilis of 1994. In Memoria de los días, Mexico City is
on the verge of extinction, but the apocalyptic destruction is universal,
shared with the rest of humanity. Finally, the city in El día del hurón—
not even Mexico City—suffered a rather simulated, fictional and cine-
matographic apocalypse, an Orwellian Big Brother conjured up by the
media. Not always alien to the Mexican social, political and economic
reality, urban dystopia was another option among the numerous the-
matic lines of the Crack. With isolated exceptions (such as Volpi’s No
será la Tierra/Season of Ash, published in 2006), it disappeared in the
group’s later narrative production and its posterior manifestos. Ironically,
twenty years later, Mexico City is still living in its everyday chaos. A post-
apocalypse in which, paraphrasing Monsiváis, the worst prophecies
already took place and, at the same time, the worst prophecies are also
about to happen.13
Notes
1. In October 1996, Mexican novelist Gonzalo Celorio wrote “México,
ciudad de papel” (“Mexico, a City Made Out of Paper”), his speech as
a new member of the Academia Mexicana de la Lengua (the Mexican
Academy of Letters), about the literary cartography of Mexico City. In
his own words, “the history of Mexico City is the history of its succes-
sive destructions. The colonial city destroyed the pre-Hispanic city, the
city built after Mexican independence destroyed the vice royal city. The
post-revolutionary city, still under construction, destroyed the city built
in the nineteenth century and the early years of the twentieth century, as
if culture were a matter of accumulation rather than displacement […]
A neoclassical façade that was taken to a different house, a church was
surrounded by the Periférico, another church was literally torn apart by
the November 20 Avenue. They made two buildings with asphyxiating
mirrors next to a fine Porfirian house” (qtd. in Rovira 2005, p. 209). All
translations in the paper are mine.
2. The links between Mexico City and literature can be traced back to dec-
ades earlier. Considered the first novel in the history of Mexico and Latin
America, José Joaquín Fernández de Lizardi’s El periquillo sarniento (The
Mangy Parrot, 1816) was already a detailed analysis of the social groups
in New Spain. Before the end of the nineteenth century, Manuel Payno
portrayed in Los Bandidos de Río Frío (The Bandits from Rio Frío, 1889–
1891) the social differences in Mexico City, determined by geographical
separations. At the beginning of the twentieth century poets like Manuel
Gutiérrez Nájera, Ramón López Velarde, and Amado Nervo had Mexico
City as one of their main thematic motives. They are, in all cases, imaginary
cities, fictitious representations, with a stronger or weaker resemblance
with the city in extra-fictional reality. In Las ciudades imaginadas en la lit-
eratura latinoamericana (Imagined Cities in Latin American Literature,
2008) Gisela Heffes recalls that “in the Latin American imaginary, cities
seem to have a different social order, and their modes of social interrela-
tion obey to a particular imaginary. Unlike ‘real’ cities, imaginary cities are
developed in books, they are not made of quarries, sawmills and foundries,
but rather of imagination” (2008, p. 17). Ignacio Sánchez Prado kindly
recommended to me Robert Tally Jr.’s essays about spatiality, urban atmos-
pheres and literature. In the prologue to Literary Cartographies. Spatiality,
Representation and Narrative (2014) Tally talks about literary cartography,
a term than encompasses the commonalities in the works of the narrator
and the cartographer: “indeed, although certain narratives may be more
ostensibly cartographic than others, all may be said to constitute forms of
literary cartography. In works of fiction, in which the imaginative faculty is
perhaps most strongly connected to the verbal and descriptive, this map-
making project becomes central to the aims and the effects of the narrative.
In the words of J. Hillis Miller, “a novel is a figurative mapping.” Speaking
figuratively, then, one could agree with Peter Turchi that every writer is
also, in some ways, a cartographer—and vice versa, perhaps” (1). For a
compilation of literary works related to Mexico City, see Armando Pereira’s
Diccionario de literatura mexicana: siglo XX (Dictionary of Mexican
Literature: 20th Century, 2000).
3. Mexico City is portrayed in two additional ways in Mexican literature at
the end of the twentieth century. First, Sara Poot-Herrera (2002) sug-
gested the concept of the besieged city, whether attacked by external
forces (El sitio/The Siege by Ignacio Solares, 1998), or as the victim
of a collective sacrifice (Y retiemble en su centro la tierra/Let the Earth
Tremble to Its Very Core by Gonzalo Celorio, 1999). This representation
does not completely abandon the dystopic-apocalyptic tone, but it also
relates to the remote historical past. Second, Mexico City was the main
urban space of the so-called literatura basura or dirty realism, influenced
by Charles Bukowski and proclaimed by Guillermo Fadanelli and Naief
Yehya. In novels like Yehya’s Obras sanitarias (Sanitary Works, 1992) and
Fadanelli’s ¿Te veré en el desayuno? (Will I See you at Breakfast?, 1999),
Mexico City is portrayed with a hyperrealist technique, in fictions where
drug addiction, prostitution, violence and citizen insecurity determine
everyday life, denying any sense of community.
4. This deterritorialization is not unique to Mexican narrative, but also is an
extended phenomenon in the narratives of other Latin American coun-
tries. Rodrigo Fresán’s Mantra, for example, was written by commission,
as a part of Mondadori’s Año 0. Young Latin American writers were asked
by the publishing company to write a novel set in a world megalopolis,
with the aim to narrate the arrival of the new millennium in these cit-
ies. Among others, Chilean Roberto Bolaño wrote Una novelita lumpen
(A Poor Little Novel, 2002), set in Rome; Cuban José Manuel Prieto
wrote Treinta días en Moscú (Thirty Days in Moscow, 2001); Colombian
Santiago Gamboa wrote Octubre en Pekín (October in Beijing, 2001);
and Guatemalan Rodrigo Rey Rosa wrote Cartas de la India 1912–1914
(Letters from India, 1912–1914, 2001), set in the city of Madras. In
“Tradition and New Writing in Latin America,” introduction to the com-
pilation New Trends in Contemporary Latin American Narrative (2014),
Timothy R. Robbins and José Eduardo González analyzed this geographic
decontextualization in relation to the reconfiguration on the national dis-
course in Latin America. Robbins and González called this generation the
post-nacionalistas, a group of Latin American writers who reconfigured the
concept of nation, and whose work reflects the new social and economic
order in the world. In their own words, “the last couple of decades of
the twentieth century Latin America has been transformed by a series of
social and economic changes that many have been acknowledged as deter-
mining the direction of contemporary fiction writing: the neoliberal reor-
ganization of the economy, cultural globalization, astounding advances
in technological communication such as the emergence of cyberspace, to
mention a few” (Robbins and González 2014, p. 3).
5. In “Pesadillas del futuro. Distopías urbanas en la narrativa mexicana con-
temporánea,” Ordiz shared a list of novels where Mexico City is repre-
sented in an apocalyptic tone. His essay focuses on four of these: Carlos
Fuentes’ Cristóbal Nonato, Homero Aridjis’ La leyenda de los soles,
Guillermo Sheridan’s El dedo de oro, and Carmen Boullosa’s Cielos de la
tierra. In “La ciudad de México en la imaginación apocalíptica,” Boris
Muñoz studied this thematic line in the chronicle genre, focusing on
four examples: Elena Poniatowska’s “Ángeles de la ciudad” (“Angels
of the City,” 1980), Carlos Monsiváis’ Amor perdido (Lost Love, 1997),
José Joaquín Blanco’s “La ciudad enemiga” (“The Enemy City,” 1997),
and Juan Villoro’s “El yuppie salvaje” (“The Wild Yuppie,” 1998). In
“La utopía apocalíptica del México neoliberal,” Ignacio Sánchez Prado
extended this urban apocalyptic approach to other genres: novel (Memoria
de los días, El día del hurón, and Los trabajos del reino/The Works of the
Kingdom by Héctor Toledano), short-story (El llanto de los niños muer-
tos/The Cry of the Dead Children by Bernardo Fernández) chronicle (Los
rituales del caos by Carlos Monsiváis), and poetry (“The Third World,” in
Los textos del yo/The texts of the I, by Cristina Rivera Garza).
6. See Ávila and Domínguez Michael (“La patología”) for criticisms against
the alleged malinchismo in the Crack literature, and further discussions
about geographical displacement in the Crack novels.
7. The Crack novels published in 1995 were Volpi’s La paz de los sepul-
cros (Aldus), Padilla’s La catedral de los ahogados (The Cathedral of the
Drowned, Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana) and Palou’s Memoria
de los días (Joaquín Mortiz). The five novels that accompanied the “Crack
Manifesto” were Memoria de los días, Chávez Castañeda’s La conspir-
ación idiota (published in 2003 by Alfaguara), and three other books
published by the Grupo Patria Cultural company in its collection Nueva
Imagen in 1996, thanks to the involvement of the editor Sandro Cohen:
Volpi’s El temperamento melancólico, Urroz’s Las Rémoras (The Obstacles
in its English translation), and Padilla’s Si volviesen sus majestades (If Their
Majesties Returned). Chávez Castañeda’s El día del hurón was one of the
four novels in a second group of Crack novels published in 1997 also by
Grupo Patria Cultural, which also included Urroz’s Herir tu fiera carne
(To Hurt your Fiery Flesh), Volpi’s Sanar tu piel amarga (To Heal your
Bitter Skin), and Palou’s Bolero. The Crack novels published during this
period fluctuate between the apocalyptic representation of Mexico City
and the search for other geographical locations. La catedral de los ahoga-
dos was set in a remote island, and it still belonged to the first stage in
Padilla’s works, characterized by the rural atmospheres, the magical-
realist techniques, and García Márquez’s influence. Si volviesen sus majes-
tades, Padilla’s next novel, was set in a medieval castle with no recogniz-
able spatial or chronological references, where a seneschal, much in the
way of Vladimir and Estragon in Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, waits for his
lords to return. The novel is the perfect example of the zero chronotope,
described by the writer in the “Crack Manifesto,” and close to the aesthet-
ics of the comic. This abstract space is also present in La conspiración idiota
by Chávez Castañeda, set in a family house where several teenagers meet
to remember their childhood. The psychoanalytic treatment of space par-
tially recalls the short-story “Casa tomada” (“House Taken Over”, 1951),
by Julio Cortázar. In two other Crack novels in the mid-nineties, its char-
acters leave Mexico City to seek refuge in other Mexican regions: the plot
in Volpi’s El temperamento melancólico takes place in a provincial haci-
enda, where actors and actresses from the capital gather to film a movie.
In Urroz’s Las Rémoras two young writers narrate each other’s story, one
in Mexico City and the other one in Las Rémoras, a fictional town in Baja
California. The first one leaves Mexico City and they meet in the coastal
town, where they put together their manuscripts. In Bolero Palou also
avoids Mexico City as the setting. The novel takes place in Puebla, Palou’s
birthplace, described as “the chameleon city that changes color, pigmented
with the chromatic aromas of absence, nostalgia” (1996, p. 38), but also
as “the scorpion city, filling its children with fear. The viper city with two
tongues, breaking everything apart with words” (1996, p. 38).
8. In addition to La paz de los sepulcros, Volpi published two novels related
to apocalypse, that did not take place in Mexico City. El temperamento
melancólico was set in a Mexican provincial hacienda, and El juego del
Apocalipsis. Viaje a Patmos (The Game of Apocalypse. A Trip to Patmos,
2000) was set in Patmos, the Greek island where San Juan proclaimed the
Apocalypse in the New Testament.
9. According to World Population Review, the population of Mexico City in
1995, the year of publication of La paz de los sepulcros, was seventeen mil-
lion inhabitants. In Volpi’s novel the city has forty million inhabitants,
while Palou’s imagined Mexico City in Memoria de los días has reached
eighty million.
10. The narrator uses a biblical term—exodus—to narrate the extinction of
humanity in Mexico City: “sé decirles que un día [Dionisio Estupiñán,
líder de la secta] se dio cuenta de que la ciudad empezaba a quedarse
vacía, puedo contarles que mucho antes se había negado a usar máscaras
para protegerse del ozono y que más cerca aún del éxodo final, se había
resistido terminantemente a usar trajes especiales para no morir, como
muchos otros, ahí nomás en cualquier calle: asfixiados, quemados por
rayos ultravioleta” (Palou 1995, p. 22).
11. Although Zagarra is a fictitious city that avoids identification with any
concrete urban reality (Sánchez Prado 2017, p. 172), the social, geo-
graphical and urban division of Zagarra, with its socially delimited neigh-
borhoods, is shared with many a megalopolis in Latin America. It serves
as a reminder, to a certain extent, of the system of city walls that divide
areas between different income levels, “an imaginary that inherently
brings together inside and outside the walls into a conceptually symbiotic
relationship, albeit a rather tense one” (Rodgers et al. 2012, p. 10).
12. The Day of the Ferret is a fabricated discourse by media, as it can be
deducted from the Verdugo’s words: “institucionalizar el caos, una
explosión con licencia. Destituir, desafectar el día, domesticar al hurón,
producir una anarquía subalterna e inofensiva, un mero carnaval pasteur-
izado” (Chávez 1997, p. 168). El Verdugo fears that citizens will actually
get involved in this fiction to the point where chaos that cannot be con-
trolled: “nada podemos hacer si la ciudad completa decide tomar parte.
No hay salida: o los matamos a todos o esperamos que sobrevivan solos al
día del hurón” (Chávez 1997, p. 172).
13. I would like to thank Stephen Gerome and Robert Goebel for their help
and advice in the English version of this document.
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Urroz, Eloy. 2000. La silenciosa herejía. Forma y contrautopía en las novelas de
Jorge Volpi. Mexico: Aldus.
Volpi, Jorge. 1995. La paz de los sepulcros. Mexico: Aldus.
———. 1996. El temperamento melancólico. Mexico: Nueva Imagen.
———. 2009. El insomnio de Bolívar. Cuatro consideraciones intempestivas sobre
América Latina en el siglo XXI. Mexico: Debate.
Zavala, Oswaldo. 2004. “El futuro que ya fue: Jorge Volpi y la novela histórica
del presente.” In En busca de Jorge Volpi. Ensayos sobre su obra, edited by
José Manuel López de Abiada, Félix Jiménez Ramírez, and Augusta López
Bernasocchi, 345–354. Madrid: Verbum.
CHAPTER 5
The Night That Repeats Itself: Social

Dystopia in Managua, Salsa City
(¡Devórame Otra Vez!), by Franz Galich
Magdalena Perkowska
It is six in the afternoon in postrevolutionary Managua—La Guajira and

Pancho Rana cross paths in La Piñata, an entertainment center in the
Nicaraguan capital. She is a prostitute and leader of a gang of thieves;
he is a former member of the Special Forces of the National Sandinista
Army. She works as bait for her band; he is going out to have fun before
fleeing to Honduras with jewels and other transportable goods he has
taken from his employers. Following this fortuitous encounter, the char-
acters visit distinct places in Managua’s nocturnal (under)world only to
end their journey in the villa of Pancho’s bosses, who are in Miami. At
six in the morning, twelve hours after the novel begins, the action comes
to an end after a battle between Pancho, the members of La Guajira’s
gang and two other assailants who had been following the pair with dis-
honest intentions. As day breaks, only La Guajira and “rat-face,” one of
the unknown men who can be considered more observer than a partici-
pant in the encounter, are left alive to escape from the scene in haste.
M. Perkowska (*) 
Department of Romance Languages, Hunter College, CUNY,
New York, NY, USA

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-92438-0_5
94 M. PERKOWSKA
This sums up Managua, Salsa City (¡Devórame otra vez!), Franz

Galich’s second novel for which the Guatemalan author, who lived in
Nicaragua, won the Central American “Rogelio Sinán” Prize in 1999–
2000.1 The text can be associated with the trend that Jean Franco called
“the costumbrismo of globalization” (2002, p. 222), texts that repre-
sent new forms of violence in Latin American cities.2 At the same time,
Galich’s novel illustrates the new fictional and narrative paradigm that
has come to define Central American literature since the 1990s.
The 1990s witnessed the end of armed conflicts that had devastated
the isthmus since the 1970s (and even before). The Sapoa accords
(1988), the later peace negotiations that were ratified in 1989 and the
electoral defeat of the FSLN in Nicaragua (1990), the peace accords
in El Salvador (1992) and Guatemala (1996)—all signaled “el fin del
guerrillerismo y del sueño utópico de la revolución,” implying, there-
fore, the need to “redefinir prioridades, identidades y proyectos cultur-
ales” (Arias 1998, p. 7). While it was crucial to end the civil wars that
were devastating both the social and economic fabric of these Central
American nations, the solution that was negotiated to these armed con-
flicts “no desembocó en una transformación de fondo de las estructuras
de poder, de la distribución de la riqueza, de las razones que habían con-
ducido a tomar el camino de la guerra revolucionaria” (Barrientos Tecún
2007). What is more, leftist movements and political parties, incorpo-
rated into the political system by the peace accords, were incapable of
resisting the implementation of neoliberal programs and policies that
have widened inequality and exacerbated poverty, making the class sys-
tem even worse (Kokotovic 2003, p. 20). Other tendencies—like the
shrinking of state institutions (itself a condition and result of the neo-
liberal system), corruption at all levels of political and social administra-
tions, prostitution, an increase in drug trafficking and the street violence
connected with it, and a generalized impunity that erodes any attempt
to take refuge in law and justice—add to this already grave situation. In
an interview with Arnulfo Agüero, Franz Galich refers to the postwar
era as the moment of “descomposición social” that sinks the majority of
Central Americans in “la miseria y desamparo” (2006). For Nicaraguan
novelist Erick Aguirre, the 1990s distinguishes itself for “su influjo de
desencanto político, su auge mercadotécnico y su disfraz democrático
amparando el latrocinio de los nuevos grupos políticos y económicos que
accedían al poder” (2007).
5 THE NIGHT THAT REPEATS ITSELF … 95
It is no surprise, then, that the dominant tone of Central American

narratives from the 1990s on is that of disillusionment, disenchantment
and bitterness, a tendency that clearly manifests through the titles of
the novels published in this era: El asco (1997) and Desmoronamiento
(2006) by Horacio Castellanos Moya (El Salvador), or El desencanto
(2001) by Jacinta Escudos (El Salvador). The ethic of political compro-
mise, spirit of social utopia and rejection of injustice that characterize
literary and cultural production in the region from the end of the 1960s
to the middle of the 1980s are replaced by narratives that represent the
consequences of both the armed conflicts and the neoliberal philosophy
that follows. These products explore private histories, intimacy and the
subjectivity of individuals (both winners and losers) who are immersed
in the complex and painful reality of the postwar period. “El énfasis de
los escritores hacia propuestas colectivas y discursos de cambios sociales
ha cedido oblicuamente hacia una narrativa más individual, más frag-
mentaria, más experimental,” observes Erick Aguirre (2004). The ide-
als of revolutionary conflict and the great ethical values of the utopian
moment disappear from the pages of novels that represent, instead, the
loss of ideological referents, indifference, hedonism, skepticism, resig-
nation, and even defeatism—in other words, “[una] cultura de sobre-
vivencia, del presente inmediato, del mañana incierto y poco probable”
(Castellanos Moya 1993, p. 45).3
One thematic trend that stands out in the narrative of postwar
Central America is a new type of violence—“new” in its nature and the
space in which it develops. This violence emerges as a sequel to armed
conflict and a direct consequence of the desperate economic situation
of the majority of the citizens of the region, which drives them to rely
on the informal economy or criminal activities like prostitution, theft
or drug trafficking. These activities are concentrated in, but not lim-
ited to, the capital cities of the region: Managua, Guatemala City, San
Salvador and even San José.4 While the war played out in mountain-
ous and rural zones during the revolutionary period, now it unfolds in
the city even though its form has changed. Unending years of armed
conflict, a war that remains embedded in the conscience of men who
are either still armed or rearmed and trained for violence, leads to its
persistence (Vigil 2000, p. 29).5 The already mentioned endurance of
the conditions that led to the revolutionary outburst are also a factor,
since “sin una transformación de las estructuras sociales y políticas,
96 M. PERKOWSKA
sin una redistribución del ingreso, la guerra encontrará nuevas mani-

festaciones” (Castellanos Moya 1993, p. 51), as the problem of youth
gangs in El Salvador proves.6 Héctor Leyva and Werner Mackenbach
underscore the anarchic and post-ideological character of these new
forms of violence, describing it as “una violencia anárquica de motivos
confusos” (2005), and a violence “despojada de un sentido políti-
co-ideológico y sin justificación ético-moral alguna” (Mackenbach
2007). The title of José Luis Rocha’s essay, “Pandilleros: armados sin
utopía” gives evidence of the ideological vacuum of violence. Rocha
describes in his essay how during the transportation strike (Managua,
April 1999), both the PLC (Partido Libre Constitucionalista) as well
as the FSLN were able to hire gang members to promote their respec-
tive agendas: “El FSLN para ‘respaldar la lucha popular,’ el PLC para
desprestigiar a los huelguistas y actuar contra ellos.”7 Managua, Salsa
City is one of the novels that illustrate this postwar violence in an urban
context, dominated by the lack of prospects and widespread unem-
ployment.8 Galich’s novel—awarded the Rogelio Sinán prize in 2000
and published in 2001—portrays social conditions and the new sub-
jectivities in Nicaragua under the government of Violeta Chamorro
(1990–1995) and, above all, that of Arnaldo Alemán (1997–2002),
which implemented neoliberal modernization to establish in the coun-
try a conservative “technocratic utopia of high efficiency and global
market dominance” (Chávez 2015, p. 9). Following neoliberal logic,
these governments privatized state industries, subjected the national
economy to conditions dictated by the global market, and dismantled
structures put in place for social protection. The weakness of dem-
ocratic institutions of control let corruption run rampant, while the
liberalization of the economy drove unemployment, poverty and ine-
quality.9 Faced with an accelerated and aggressive adaptation to neo-
liberal logic, Nicaraguan literature published after 1990 “recovered its
dissenting and critical function vis-à-vis political discourse” (Chávez
2015, p. 295). In Managua, Salsa City, all of the characters flaunt the
marginalization of the outcast and represent a condition that, following
Zygmunt Bauman, we could call the “collateral damage” of neoliberal
politics. The spaces of Managua and the activities of the protagonists
that act in this setting conform to a vision of a dystopic and dysphoric
society, and of a “dysfunctional” nation.
Managua by Night
Two elements make up the atmosphere in which the action of the
novel develops: the night and music. The plot begins at six in the after-
noon, when “Dios le quita el fuego a Managua y le deja la mano libre
al Diablo. […] de no se sabe dónde, empiezan a salir los diablos y las
diablas. Managua se oscurece y las tinieblas ganan la capital…” (Galich
2001, p. 9). Twelve hours later, when La Guajira and “rat-face” leave the
villa where the final battle occurred:
Dios volvía a ponerle la llama a Managua y le amarraba nuevamente las manos

al Diablo. Diablos y diablas volvían a sus madrigueras después de una vertigi-
nosa noche. Los que habían descansado de noche, sumidos en los sueños y la
locura de las ansias por tener algo, salían a las calles…. (2001, p. 126)
From its beginning the novel presents the city as an arena where the
symbolic fight between the forces of day and night takes place, a zone
reclaimed by two seemingly opposite impulses. The narrator blurs this
difference by affirming that the majority of the day dwellers make their
appearance only to “vivir de la caridad, el robo o la estafa” (2001,
p. 126). The shadows that cover Managua by night are at the same time
real and figurative. On the one hand, they allude to the lack of light-
ing, the fact that “las luminarias no sirv[an] del todo y las pocas que sir-
ven, o se las roban los mismos ladrones de la Empresa Eléctrica o se las
roban los del gobierno para iluminar la Carretera del Norte cuando vie-
nen personajes importantes, para que no piensen que estamos en total
desgracia” (2001, p. 9). On the other hand, they symbolize a noctur-
nal space of otherness and ex-centricity, both threatening and tempting
at the same time, populated by “devils” or “creatures of the night,” in
which Rossana Reguillo-Cruz sees “la metáfora de los márgenes y de la
irreductibilidad al discurso moral de la sociedad” (2002, p. 56).10
The nocturnal ambience of Managua resounds in the novel with refer-
ences to popular music that burst into sentences as if they suddenly blare
from a loudspeaker:
En los semáforos del Colonial escucharon música pero no les pareció, ya

que provenía de una rockanola: /Qué locura fue enamorarme de ti, si
al saber que tu amor ya tenía dueño, qué locura fue enamorarme de ti\,
además, ya cerca del salón, éste lucía silencioso, no había música en vivo y
lo que ambos querían era bailar. (Galich 2001, pp. 45–46)
98 M. PERKOWSKA
Bailemos para mientras. Sí, amor, le dijo, levantándose, acercándosele y se

le pegó al cuerpo. /Amigo, yo siento celos hasta del propio viento, lo mío
es un amor voraz que crece como fuego. Sí, creo que antes de nacer te
estaba amando y ahora tengo que morir de sed\ sonaba la salsa en Salsa
City…. (2001, p. 49)
Salsa dominates with “¡Devórame otra vez!” by Lalo Rodríguez invad-

ing the readers’ experience from the very title and sprinkling the text
at intervals. The song thus informs an accelerated rhythm that reflects,
at the level of narration, the uncontrollable time of the action and the
frenzy of people in constant motion.11 The inter-discursive references to
popular music—particularly to “¡Devórame otra vez!,” besides summa-
rizing in one sentence the romantic-erotic encounter between La Guajira
and Pancho Rana, constitute a symbolic leitmotiv that draws the readers’
attention to the idea of Managua as a space that devours its inhabitants.
Salsa is also one of the signifiers of the city, given that its origins in terms
of the musical genre are urban (New York).12 As a signifier of urban cul-
ture, salsa does not refer, however, to an abstract or indifferent city or
to its most public spaces, but rather to its popular zones and ex-centric
routes, like the spots visited by Galich’s characters.
After the scene in La Piñata, Pancho Rana and La Guajira, followed
by her gang, spend several hours wandering the city—this can be read
in light of Michel de Certeau’s reflections about “walking as a space
of enunciation” (1984, p. 98). For the French theorist, “[t]he act of
walking is to the urban system what the speech act is to language or to
the statements uttered” (1984, p. 97). Walking is a spatial representa-
tion (acting out) of place, that “affirms, suspects, tries out, transgresses,
respects, etc., the trajectories it ‘speaks’” (1984, p. 99). Its turns and
detours define a rhetoric and express the art of forming a trajectory
(1984, p. 100), whose expression is based on two key figures: synec-
doche, which amplifies the detail, and asyndeton, which fragments the
passed through space and undoes its continuity, effecting “the ellipsis of
conjunctive loci” (1984, p. 101). The traveled space is thus a selection
and composition; it is a text that has significance and an unfolding of sto-
ries that a physical space has accumulated.
The protagonists of Managua, Salsa City do not walk, they travel
by car because Managua is not a city made for walking.13 Their route
includes numerous spaces that are synecdoches of the nocturnal under-
world of Managua: dance halls (Dancing Club El Madroño, “el Molin
Rush,” the Tropicana), bars (El Escorpión), strip clubs that also double
as brothels (the Night Club Aquí Polanco), motels (Remembranzas) and
popular restaurants (el Munich). All of these spots seethe with illicit and
transgressive activities like theft, drug trafficking, prostitution or other
forms of sexual exploitation, and they invite a hedonistic attitude and
debauchery through drug and alcohol abuse and furtive sex. It is a con-
text that, from the perspective of the dominant social norm, can be char-
acterized by “el relajamiento moral y por los vicios” that “sale[n] de esta
norma, amenaza[n] la estabilidad y el orden y por consecuencia [son]
portador[es] de violencia” (Reguillo-Cruz 2002, p. 56).
Since the publication of Facundo and “El matadero,” Latin American
cultural thought tended to conceptualize the city as the privileged space
of civilization in which modernity and progress were instituted and
achieved. However, works of “costumbrismo de globalización” (Franco
2002, p. 222) or “realismo sucio” (Ferman), like those of Franco,
Vallejo, Gutiérrez, Rodríguez Juliá, Fonseca and Galich, question the
idealization of modern liberal thought, portraying the contemporary
city as a space of transgression and otherness. Like the acts of pedestrian
speech acts that Certeau describes (1984, p. 97), the journey that the
characters in Managua, Salsa City undertake defies the practical urban
rationality and, in this way, its displacement is an act of resistance that
opens the space to something different. As Silvia Gianni suggests, Galich
“dibuja una ciudad carnavalizada, que de noche se quita el disfraz de
centro legal, de ciudad del trabajo y del comercio […] Managua se con-
vierte en la urbe de la fiesta, de la salsa, del placer sexual; la ciudad que
devora…” (2007). The novel blurs the city as a formal, public and offi-
cial space while at the same time the image of an ex-centric, marginal
and subaltern city takes shape. This perspective, while attractive in the
sense that it grants to the ex-centric space an agency that resists, disre-
gards the fact that while this space opens up to something different, at
the same time it represents a loss. The party, the carnival of drink, drugs,
food, and sexual pleasure are all, in fact, manifestations of an insatiable
individualism and a competitive attitude (in the end, all the masculine
protagonists compete for La Guajira) that can lead to the dissolution
of all forms of solidarity, as David Harvey signals in A Brief History of
Neoliberalism (2006, pp. 23, 82). Consequently, this partying city would
be a space where neoliberalism co-opts the anti-normative resistance to
secretly achieve its ideal: destroy the force of community and make the
collective memory of its political dissent invisible. In this partying city,
100 M. PERKOWSKA
organized around places that offer immediate gratification, public spaces

where people used to gather to express their political opinions and to
make demands, or, in Harvey’s words, “urban commons” (2013, p. 73)
disappears from people’s consciousness. Paradoxically, Arnoldo Alemán
sought a similar effect as the mayor of Managua (1990–1995) when he
ordered the destruction of all of the revolutionary murals that had dec-
orated multiple public spaces between 1979 and 1990. He then pushed
through the construction of a fountain in the middle of the Plaza de la
Revolución to restrict public gatherings of the Sandinista opposition.
For this reason, it is significant that the sites or buildings associ-
ated with history and national memory, or those that figure largely in
Nicaraguan politics, occupy a peripheral space in the urban map that
Galich charts in his novel. He mentions only four of these spaces, and in
passing, because La Guajira and Pancho Rana do not stop in their vicin-
ity: the ex Palacio Nacional (which has been converted to a museum,
the Palacio Nacional de la Cultura), the Parque de la Paz, the National
Stadium and the US Embassy. The first two become carnivalesque
through their association with animals. Pancho Rana refers to the build-
ing that until 1979 was the Palacio Nacional by its popular name, the pig
keeper (74),14 while the Park emerges from a playful and ironic play of
words:
• Del lado derecho es el ex-Palacio Nacional, la chanchera, y a la

izquierda, del otro lado de la calle, allí donde está ese como galli-
nero alto, es el Parque de la paz…
• ¿De lapas? ¿Qué es esa chochada? ¿Las loras?
• ¡No mujer! …, después de la guerra viene la paz (Galich 2001,
pp. 74–75).
This conversation reveals that La Guajira, who possesses an excel-

lent knowledge of all the bars, clubs, motels and dancehalls, does not
recognize the public spaces significant to national history. The physi-
cal “center” of the nation, where barely twenty years before, in July of
1979, the celebration of the defeat of dictatorship and the military vic-
tory of FSLN took place, is not a space where the outcast and helpless
sectors of society like La Guajira and her band tend to move. Instead,
La Guajira is afraid of being recognized in Calle Ocho, “un enjambre de
bares de mala muerte donde bajo la mascarada de licor, la prostitución y
la droga eran moneda de libre circulación” (2001, p. 73).
The journey of Pancho Rana and La Guajira, which the narrator traces
through synecdoche and asyndeton—naming bars and neighborhoods,
highways, streets, traffic signals, roundabouts, markets, buildings and
the spaces of nocturnal life already mentioned, charts a spatial and cog-
nitive map of Managua from which a decentered and chaotic city, with-
out center nor axis, emerges. Galich describes these characteristics of the
Nicaraguan capital in Y te diré quién eres, the second part of his unfin-
ished Cuarteto centroamericano:
Esa ciudad que no es ciudad, son varios satélites girando a la loca, alrede-
dor de nadie sabe qué ni quién, aunque pensándolo bien es alrededor de
los dos soles de la tamalada. […] No hay núcleo, no hay centro, descen-
trada, desconcentrada, deschavetada, dejicarada, una ciudad sin jícara pero
a la vez con muchas jícaras, con sus potreros con semáforos dentro de la
misma ciudad y a la par las Catedrales con techos como cajillas de huevos o
descachimbadas por el terremoto y más potreros alrededor y centros com-
erciales con dos elevadores y dos bandos de gradas eléctricas y lagunas de
aguas podridas como sus políticos …. (2006, p. 102)
The lack of center to which the protagonist refers here and which the
narrator of Managua, Salsa City suggest in his mapping is at the same
time literal and figurative. The earthquake on December 23, 1972 dev-
astated the old sector of Managua and destroyed 80% of the urban struc-
tures including hospitals, schools and other important institutions (Babb
2001, p. 52). The tree lined avenues and almost all of the tall buildings,
with the exception of the Hotel InterContinental and the Banco de
América Central, disappeared. Despite substantial international aid, the
city did not recover because Somoza and his family squandered foreign
aid by investing in their own properties and projects. As anthropologist
Florence Babb observes, “Three decades after the earthquake destroyed
it, the city has a feeling of structurelessness, with open spaces where
there was once an urban core” (2001, p. 52). In the 1990s, Arnoldo
Alemán launched an urban development plan for the capital that cre-
ated a new “center” designed around modern or ultramodern architec-
tural projects: the new cathedral, a shopping mall (Metrocentro), a hotel
that now carries the name InterContinental and a gigantic rotunda (the
rotunda Rubén Darío) that is adorned with fountains and colored lights
(2001, p. 56). In the novel, this illuminated rotunda represents a piece
of the United States for La Guajira (Galich 2001, p. 20). However,
102 M. PERKOWSKA
according to Babb, this new “center” of Managua is a place for the

elites (2001, p. 67) who can satisfy their need for “modernity” and con-
sumption there. This modernizing policy can be read in light of Henri
Lefebvre’s theory of differential space. Lefebvre states that “urban space-
time, as soon as we stop defining it in terms of industrial rationality …
appears as differential, each place and each moment existing only within
a whole, through the contrasts and oppositions that connect to, and dis-
tinguish it from, other moments and places” (2003, p. 137). The new or
second center is a place that reflects the aspirations of the new economic
and political elites and the image of national destiny that this group
wishes to project, thus the design excludes the social Other. Therefore,
the accelerated remodeling of the Nicaraguan capital, that was driven by
the neoliberal “technocratic utopia” (Chávez 2015, p. 7), demonstrates
a symbolic struggle “to appropriate distinctive signs in the form of classi-
fied, classifying goods or practices” (Bourdieu 1984, p. 249)—a struggle
in which space is an element of social distinction.
It is worth noting, however, that in Nicaragua this symbolic fight is
complicated by competition between two political elites whose ideology
seems to be situated in opposite camps. The reference in the previous
quote to “los dos soles de la tamalada” and to many “jícaras” alludes to
the rivalry between Alemán (as mayor and later president) and Daniel
Ortega, and to numerous politicians involved in innumerable cases of
corruption.15 Despite the fact that neoliberal political discourse insists on
establishing equivalents between democracy, modernization, order and
efficiency, according to Daniel Chávez (2015, pp. 267–272), the political
and social management of the country is chaotic, inefficient and plagued
by corruption, political apathy and rivalry among its leaders. In this
sense, decentralized Managua is a microcosm of Nicaragua, a synecdoche
of the disorder and chaos that dominate national politics.
“Whose city is it?”: the verbal map of Managua—or Certeau’s “long
poem of walking” (1984, p. 101)—that Galich traces in the novel evokes
“la ciudad sumergida.” This is the colonial Lima of Alberto Flores
Galindo’s eponymous study that “devela un mundo caótico, peligroso,
dominado por bandas urbanas, una ciudad donde rige el miedo en gen-
eral y el miedo al otro en particular” (Spitta 2003, p. 17), distant from
the modern utopia of order and reason of the lettered city. The outcast
inhabitants of Managua, Salsa City, like La Guajira and her band, rep-
resent the unpleasantness that doggedly pursues the supposedly civi-
lized urban space (Ferman 2007, p. 207), but at the same time, find the
inclemency created by the neoliberal utopia that abandons and excludes

them by following the chimera of rapid development.16 For them and for
the narrator, Managua is a hell where poverty, unemployment, violence,
prostitution and corruption (the last of these two in both a literal and
figurative sense) are the inalterable reality of everyday life:
para mientras tanto, aquí en el infierno, digo Managua, todo sigue igual:
los cipotes piderreales y huelepegas, los cochones y las putas, los chivos y los
políticos, los ladrones y los policías (que son lo mismo que los políticos, sean
sandináis o liberáis o conservaduráis, cristianáis o cualquiermierdáis, jueputas
socios del Diablo porque son la misma chochada. (Galich 2001, p. 10)
The Underdogs
As the previous quote brings forth, the narrator shares the language of
the novel’s characters—escaliche, a slang from youth gangs and the mar-
ginal sectors of Managua.17 Like music, it forms a part of the urban
culture and environment that Galich recreates in his texts. At the same
time, it is an index of the world from which the characters come and to
which they belong. For Bakhtin, language is more than an instrument of
communication or system of abstract grammatical rules; it is above all, a
worldview. Because it is a social and ideological system, language refracts
class relations (1981, p. 271). In this sense, the colloquial language of
Managua’s streets that Galich portrays in Managua Salsa City situates
the optic of the narration and of the diegesis among the underdogs. In
this novel, the underdogs are the individuals discarded by both sides of the
conflict in the 1980s in Nicaragua (Kokotovic 2003, p. 25) and excluded
from the processes of neoliberal restructuring that began in the 1990s.
The intertextual tie with Mariano Azuela’s novel The Underdogs that
I am creating by using his title to refer to Galich’s characters is not coin-
cidence. Although Azuela recreates everyday language of rural zones in
his text, it is one of the first Latin American novels that makes popular
spoken word a part of its aesthetic project. It is a novel about individ-
uals outcast by both sides of the historic-political process that was the
Mexican Revolution, and furthermore about the gradual decomposition
of the revolutionary ideal. A crucial difference manifests, however, in the
narrative voice. The language that The Underdogs’s narrator employs is
cultured, sophisticated and, at times, poetic, and it contrasts strongly
with the rural orality of the characters that comes through in the novel’s
104 M. PERKOWSKA
dialogue. The contrast reveals the narrator’s attitude and relative position
as superior. In Managua, Salsa City, the narrator shares the same per-
spective and belong to the same level as the characters (with the excep-
tion of two erotic passages). The language that they use, like the music
that they share, is a centrifugal force, an ex-centric expression: its ludic,
almost carnivalesque character revels in double meanings, irony, puns,
and other word games as well as the abuse of coarse or vulgar terms.
This language defies the habitual expression of the lettered city (cul-
tured, civilized, literary) and the centripetal normativity of a public and
official national language, which seems as foreign to Galich’s characters
as national history is to La Guajira. Through an ironic displacement of
positions, the poor and marginalized underdogs, and their speech, con-
stitutes the center of Managua, Salsa City’s world.
All of the novel’s characters are fictitious, but at the same time, they
are real and historical because they represent concrete social types and
situations that were common beginning in the 1990s in Nicaragua. Their
lives, actions and attitudes incarnate the misery and neglect into which
descend the economic strata abandoned to their own fortune by the
government’s neoliberal philosophy. La Guajira describes herself as “una
mujer que jefea una pandilla de tamales y que además putea cuando la
necesidad de culear aprieta” (Galich 2001, p. 26). Beauty and independ-
ent character defend her from poverty, but at the same time that they
make her depend upon male desire:
Aquí estoy yo una mujer pobre que tiene la suerte de ser bonita y atractiva
pero en el fondo soy una auténtica mierda, que no sirvió para mayor cosa,
más que para culiar y vivir de la riña. Desde que tenía como 14 años me
desvirgaron y como soy bonita, y con buen culito, no me tiré a la pega,
pues los muchachos se peleaban por mí, entonces me daban buenas cosas
…. (2001, p. 54)
As a prostitute, La Guajira incarnates one of the most visible phenomena

of social decay in Nicaragua in the 1990s: poverty and helplessness push
women and even young girls to offer themselves as merchandise not only
to men who are as poor and outcast as they are, but also to “los hom-
bres de reales, los del gobierno, las altas vergas del ejército y los capos-
narco” (2001, p. 41). Various scenes in the novel allude to this problem,
representing its distinct facets. At the beginning, an anonymous woman
appears for whom a client’s money means something to eat and clothes
for her children: “por lo menos paga la cuenta y de puro ipegüe me lleva
al motel y me da unas mis ciento cincuenta cañas para con eso poder
golpear algo sabroso en la casa y comprar ya sea una cruz o un caballo
y algo para los chateles, porque no me gusta que anden en bolas …”
(2001, p. 12). Another fragment denounces sexual exploitation of
minors: “En el Molino Rojo no los encontraron, pero se quedaron
viendo el show de una muchachita de quince años a quien todavía se le
veían los huesos tiernos, pero que ya se comportaba como una profe-
sional” (2001, p. 83). In Managua’s hell, the poor woman is one of the
“criaturas de la noche” (Reguillo-Cruz 2002, p. 56) that offers her body
as a product of consumption to the highest bidder.18 Her most success-
ful social “climbing” would mean that a rich man would make her his
lover, as La Guajira’s fantasy attests when she confuses Pancho Rana with
a nouveau riche.
La Guajira’s gang consists of three ex-soldiers who fought in the
armed conflict of the 1980s: Perrarrenca and Paila’pato were part of
the Contra, while Mandrake was conscripted by force to fight for the
Ejército Popular Sandinista (Sandinista Popular Army). Demilitarized,
without any profession, preparation or social protection, they resort to
assault and robbery in order to survive.19 Like them, Pancho Rana is
ex-military and represents a very common fate in the new social scenario
of Nicaragua in the 1990s. A Captain in the Irregular Battalion of the
Sandinista Special Forces and trained by the Vietnamese, Pancho Rana
finds himself demilitarized and abandoned to his fate. He finds work as
a CPF (Cuerpo de Protección Física) or private guard, protecting the
life and goods of a couple that personifies the new economic elites. Two
anonymous male characters complete the picture: a violent thief who was
recently “en las calles de Miami desvalijando incautos turistas europeos
que andan de abre jeta, creyendo que los yunais es el paraíso terrenal”
(Galich 2001, p. 111) and who now hopes to rape La Guajira, and his
libidinous but pusillanimous friend “cara de ratón” (2001, p. 88). All
of these individuals remain armed as if they were still in the ranks of an
army: Pancho Rana carries a Makarov attached to his leg (2001, p. 76),
while at home he keeps an “escopeta 12 recortada” (2001, p. 89), car-
tridges, magazines and fragmentation grenades. The gang’s members
bring a 38 special, a revolver and a folding AK (2001, p. 87), while the
thief-rapist flaunts a Browning 45 (2001, p. 103).
106 M. PERKOWSKA
None of them are plugged into the work economy (with the excep-
tion of Pancho Rana who still has a job, even though given his past it is
a degrading one for him—as such, he considers abandoning it and taking
his employer’s jewels in the process). As we have seen, La Guajira believes
that “en el fondo [es] una auténtica mierda, que no sirvió para mayor
cosa, más que para culiar y vivir de la riña” (2001, p. 54). Mandrake
“nunca había hecho nada de nada, excepto robar, beber guaro, fumar
monte, putear, canear y andar con la pandilla” (2001, p. 119). The top
down model of modus operandi—imposed by politicians, government
officials and the supposed forces of order—is that of corruption, fraud,
theft and easy earnings. Like what happens in Mexico City portrayed in
Reguillo-Cruz’s essay, in Galich’s Managua “[p]olicías y políticos asumen
[…] la forma de demonios que, al amparo de una supuesta legalidad,
son percibidos como agentes importantes del deterioro y cómplices de
una delincuencia que avanza, incontenible, no sólo sobre la institucion-
alidad, sino sobre ciudadanas y ciudadanos …” (Reguillo-Cruz 2002,
p. 63). In this situation, the characters’ anti-normative acts (or “anti-so-
cial,” according to official discourse) can be considered in the same terms
that Harvey uses to explain the actions of rioters and looters in the streets
of London in 2011, who were described as “savages” by official jour-
nalism. Harvey argues that “They are only doing what everybody else
is doing, though in a different way—more blatantly and visibly, in the
streets” (2013, p. 156). Given the crisis of values and institutions, trans-
gression and aggression are the way of life for the “diablos y las diablas”
(Galich 2001, p. 9) of Managua, Salsa City, who incarnate and symbol-
ize a post-work society and culture (Ferman 2007).
This concept comes from María Milagros López’s study on Puerto
Rican society, where work culture was completely redefined after the
1960s due to the increasing economic and political dependence of the
island on the United States. It alludes to ways of life that “do not pre-
suppose the centrality of work or its supporting reproductive apparatus
in individuals, families, and communities” (1995, p. 165), as the result
of a strategy of development and modernization that is based on “the
exclusion of a large sector of the working population from the produc-
tive process” (1995, p. 168). Historical and political differences aside,
the process of neoliberal reconversion in Nicaragua also produces a
post-work subjectivity, whose imaginary favors instant gratification, by
discarding the idea of sacrifice in the name of an abstract, insecure and
discriminatory future.20 The narrator’s comments with which Galich

ends the first chapter of the novel prove this attitude: “yo por eso no
soy nada, ni chicha ni limonada … no creo en nada porque sólo pal-
mado camino, pero tengo eggs y muchas ganas de culiar o cualquier
cosa, así de simple, lo importante es vivir, hacer algo, no quedarse par-
queado porque entonces sí te lleva la gran pu-pu…ta!!” (2001, p. 10).
This reflection demonstrates an existential vacuum—an existence adrift—
which revels in the nihilistic and cynical disposition of the “cultura de
sobrevivencia, del presente inmediato, del mañana incierto y poco prob-
able” (Castellanos Moya 1993, p. 45), which Horacio Castellanos Moya
finds in the postwar societies of Central America. As a political category,
this “conquest of the present” (Maffesoli, qtd. in López 1995, p. 181)
is located between transgression and accommodation, because if, on the
one hand, post-work subjectivity resists the logic of capital, on the other,
it reinforces it (López 1995, p. 176). Victims of the political and social
situation due to neoliberal reconversion in Nicaragua and abusers of oth-
ers like them because of their delinquent background, the characters of
Managua, Salsa City represent a dysphoric subjectivity and a dystopic
culture; the state that should be helping them finds itself adrift between
two ideological projects that have already lost all political legitimacy and
do not offer any promise of a future that is different from the present.
This dystopic vision of the future is represented metaphorically in
the novel’s last scenes. The thriller of seduction and persecution leads
irredeemably to its end, a symbolic battle in which Pancho Rana, La
Guajira’s gang and the anonymous assailant, face off. Misha Kokotovic
observes that this scene is a grotesque repetition of the Contra war
(2003, p. 28), an interpretation that is suggested to the reader by the
identity and military past of the participants, the memories of Pancho
Rana before and after the fight, and the associations that the characters
establish between their actions of the present and the past.21 The differ-
ence between the previous war and the present one is that the present
hostilities do not correspond with any cause or ideology, but are moti-
vated by petty interests and a game of appearances (Kokotovic 2003, p.
28). Those who participate in the battle do not even know with whom
they fight and why they die. This way, the battle between Pancho Rana
and the gang stages the “violencia anárquica de motivos confusos”
(Leyva 2005), which according to Héctor Leyva represents the social
decay of the Isthmus nations in their postwar novels.
108 M. PERKOWSKA
Having said that, this scene, or rather its ending, can also be inter-
preted as an allegory of the fate of the nation in the 1990s. Franz Galich
has signaled in numerous interviews that the character of La Guajira is
a metaphor of Nicaragua that symbolizes a “riqueza codiciada” (Gianni
2007).22 Pancho Rana, as ex sandinista, and the gang of ex contras fight
to conquer this woman—nation, Nicaragua—in order to later exert
dominion and control over her. However, the combatants mutually
annihilate each other so that, in the end, La Guajira as the survivor of
the battle goes with a third masculine character— “cara de ratón,” who
seems “buenote, y hasta baboso” (Galich 2001, p. 125), but who also
starts with taking some of the jewels that Pancho Rana had given her.
In Y te diré quién eres (Mariposa traicionera), which continues the story
of Managua, Salsa City taking off from the final scene, “cara de ratón”
is shown as a libidinous, depraved and morally corrupt man who abuses
La Guajira, prostitutes her, and forces her to collaborate in the founding
of a transnational business that traffics in women and prostitution. The
national allegory opens itself thus to an unequivocal interpretation (per-
haps too unequivocal): after the war-battle in which both factions end
up defeated, the woman-nation falls into the hands of the character who
incarnates corruption and deprivation, and who looks to maximize his
earnings. The fact that the figure of a prostitute becomes a metaphor for
the nation turns out to be very significant, because it signals the state
of need and neglect in which the poorest and most marginalized citi-
zens find themselves. It recognizes the abuse and humiliation they suffer
daily in order to survive. La Guajira as metaphor of the nation incarnates
thus the social dystopia of Nicaragua in the 1990s. The utopia, this ideal
place that does not exist, whose spirit passed by Nicaragua in the 1970s
and the beginning of the 1980s, has never been more than an idea or
desire. In contrast, the dystopia, an imaginary place of misery and mis-
fortune, has been made real. It has settled on the ruins of the conflict
that had swept aside all ideals. The hell of nocturnal Managua, the city
that devours its inhabitants and where everything stays the same, is one
of its incarnations. Browitt (2017) and Kokotovic (2003, p. 28) attempt
to find a positive take in the fact that La Guajira survives the battle and
escapes at dawn with “cara de ratón.” This hopeful reading of the critics
forgets, however, that from its very first page the novel underscores the
repetitive nature of the diurnal and nocturnal life in Managua; after the
dawn another night will come, a night that repeats itself. If, as I have
argued here, the rebellious attitude of the characters is the symptom of
an unstoppable individualism that seeks easy and immediate gratification

for which one nevertheless has to compete, then all ties of solidarity and
sense of community also disappear. What is lost is a being-in-common
that shelters the memories of the past and imagines future possibilities.
The night is going to continue. Galich’s political slant in Managua, Salsa
City is not made up of false hope, but of its absence when a technocratic
utopia and nihilistic subjectivities that it produces exile commonality
from conscience and memory.
Notes
1. Franz Galich (1951–2007) published three short story collections and
four novels, as well as numerous short stories and essays that appeared in
magazines, newspapers and literary or critical anthologies. His published
works include Ficcionario inédito (1979, stories), La princesa de Onix y
otros relatos (1989), Huracán corazón del cielo (1995, novel), Managua,
Salsa City (¡Devórame otra vez!) (2000, novel), El ratero y otros rela-
tos (2003), En este mundo matraca (2004, novel), Y te diré quién eres
(Mariposa traicionera) (2006, novel), Tikal futura. Memorias para un
mundo incierto (novelita futurista) (2012, novel) y Perrozompopo y otros
cuentos latinoamericanos (2017). Managua, Salsa City, together with Y
te diré quién eres are the first two parts of a project titled Cuarteto cen-
troamericano. This project was never finished due to the premature death
of Galich in 2007.
2. These texts include narratives by Fernando Vallejo and Jorge Franco
(Colombia), Rubem Fonseca and Paulo Lins (Brazil), Juan Villoro
(Mexico), Edgardo Rodríguez Juliá (Puerto Rico), or Pedro Juan
Gutiérrez (Cuba), and the essays of Villoro, Juan Blanco, Emilio Pérez
Cruz (Mexico), Alfonso Salazar (Colombia), and Boris Muñoz and José
Roberto Duque (Venezuela). Franco writes: “The life and death of delin-
quents has become a common theme of urban chronicles, newspapers,
magazines, and the fiction I describe as the costumbrismo of globaliza-
tion. Costumbrismo was a nineteenth-century response to moderniza-
tion. But whereas in the nineteenth century the old customs could be
captured as quaint anachronisms on the verge of disappearance, the con-
temporary texts are postapocalyptic, reflecting the horror of the middle
classes as their whole cultural world implodes” (Franco 2002, p. 222).
Galich’s novel does not include the middle class perspective on the cul-
tural changes that Jean Franco refers to, but it portrays the force with
which they take over Nicaraguan society.
110 M. PERKOWSKA
3. Regarding current tendencies in Central American literature, see Aguirre

(2004, 2007), Barrientos Tecún (2007), Browitt (2007), Cortez (2010),
Kokotovic (2003), Leyva (2005), Mackenbach (2007), Ortiz Wallner
(2002, 2012), and Rodríguez (2009).
4. The change has more to do with the form of violence than with the space
in which it develops. I disagree here with Jeff Browitt who refers to the
more recent Central American novel as “una narrativa cuyo escenario
principal ha vuelto a la ciudad después del romanticismo revolucionario
que buscaba el reflejo de la nación en la supuesta pureza y organicidad del
campo” (2007). Many novels of the revolutionary period—for instance,
Después de las bombas (1979), by Arturo Arias, Los demonios salvajes
(1978), by Mario Roberto Morales, ¿Te dio miedo la sangre (1977), by
Sergio Ramírez, El último juego (1977), by Gloria Guardia, or La mujer
habitada (1988), by Gioconda Belli—place their action in the cities of
the Isthmus. At the same time, some of the most recent novels deal
with the topic of drug traficking violence on the Caribbean coast of the
Atlantic; this is the case for Sergio Ramírez’s El cielo llora por mí (2008).
5. About the figure of the former soldier in postwar Central American fic-
tion, see Sophie Esch’s essays.
6. There are also gangs that emerge in Nicaragua in the 1990s: “Las pan-
dillas empezaron a aparecer en Nicaragua en los años 90, cuando tocó
a su fin la guerra y muchos jóvenes integrantes del ejército retornaron a
sus barrios y a un desempleo en acelerada expansión. El conocimiento del
manejo de armas y de tácticas militares adquirido durante el servicio mil-
itar, y el afán de recuperar el estatus social que les dio ser defensores de la
patria, se conjugaron, en muchos casos, para convertir a bastantes de ellos
en una suerte de defensores del barrio, con un sesgo cada vez más delin-
cuencial en sus actividades. La pandilla fue la forma que encontraron para
imponerse a una sociedad que los excluía, después de haber demandado
de ella los mayores sacrificios” (Rocha 1999). This postwar abandonment
that José Luis Rocha describes is the situation in which the characters of
Mangua, Salsa City find themselves.
7. About the outbreak of violence at the heart of the University protests and
the transportation strike in April, 1999, when the Alemán government
and the opposition (Ortega’s FSLN) recur to gangs, see the editorial
“Violencia: ¿un ciclo interminable?,” in the magazine Envío (1999).
8. Other examples, among many, are Castellanos Moya’s novels Baile con ser-
pientes (1996) and El arma en el hombre (2001) as well as Rodrigo Rey
Rosa’s Que me maten si … (1996) and Piedras encantadas (2001).
9. Babb and Chávez’s works offer an excellent commentary on the neoliberal
decade and its consequences in Nicaragua.
10. Reguillo-Cruz, who studies the construction of the other in urban inter-

actions, bases her investigation in the concrete case of modern Mexico,
but many of her contributions can be extended to other metropolitan
centers. In fact, her reflections about the territorilization of violence clar-
ify more than one aspect of Galich’s novel. According to the autor, the
normative perspective associates three fields of meaning to violence in
the city: “un territorio habitado por la pobreza; un tiempo nocturno y
de excepción y un entorno caracterizado por el relajamiento moral y por
los vicios” (2002). From this perspective, those guilty of violence are “‘las
criaturas de la noche’, los seres nocturnos, metáfora de los márgenes y de
la irreductibilidad al discurso moral de la sociedad: drogadictos, borra-
chos, prostitutas, jóvenes que escapan a la definición normalizada, homo-
sexuales, travestidos, pensados como portadores de los antivalores de la
sociedad y propagadores del mal” (2002, p. 56). All of Galich’s characters
are “estas criaturas de la noche” whose actions are anti-normative.
11. Two other salsa songs are quoted in the novel: “Que locura fue enam-
orarme de ti” (Galich 2001, pp. 26–27, 45, 49) and “La cita” (p. 49).
Furthermore, the novel refers to two boleros “Sombras, nada más” (p.
42) and “Presentimiento” (pp. 67–68), as well as a quote from Leo
Dan’s song “Por un caminito te fui a buscar” (p. 85).
12. Ted A. Henken defines salsa as “Cuban music, played by Puerto Ricans, in
New York City” (2009, p. 315).
13. The fact that the characters in Managua, Salsa City move around in
a vehicle instead of walking does not invalidate my use of Michel de
Certeau’s ideas because the author himself refers to both walking and
traveling in his reflections (1984, p. 106).
14. People called it “la chanchera” because it was the place where Somoza’s
Representatives and Senators held their legislative sessions. August 22,
1978, the Comando Sandinista Rigoberto López Pérez, led by Edén
Pastora (Comandante Cero) and Dora María Téllez, carried out a succes-
ful attack in which they took all of Somoza’s legislators prisoner. Pastora
had cristened this action as “operación chanchera.”
15. The word “tamal” is used in Nicaragua to refer to “thief” or “delin-
quent.” “Jícara” means “head.” In popular language, Arnoldo Alemán
was “El Tamalón” due to his physical largeness.
16. About forced relocation, and the impact of neoliberal policies for the
poorest Nicaraguas in general, see Babb (2001).
17. The representation of colloquial urban language is one of the character-
istics of experimental Central American narrative starting in the 1970s.
Guatemalan Marco Antonio Flores’s Los compañeros begins this ten-
dency in 1976. It is followed by Mario Roberto Morales’s Los demonios
112 M. PERKOWSKA
salvajes (1978), Arturo Arias’s Después de las bombas (1979) and Itzam
Na (1981) which recreate the speech of the urban middle classes and
youth gangs. Dante Barrientos Tecún relates this direction in Central
American novels with other contemporary litereary phenomena: “Es
indudable que esta estética de recuperación de las hablas urbanas cotid-
ianas de las clases medias juveniles, de escritura fragmentaria y desenfa-
dada, se inscribe dentro de la línea de la literatura llamada ‘de la onda’ en
México (Gustavo Sáinz, José Agustín), se articula con estructuras narrati-
vas barrocas (Severo Sarduy) e igualmente con las propuestas de incorpo-
ración de técnicas cinematográficas a la literatura (Manuel Puig)” (2007).
18. The proliferation of prostitution has been denounced in the Nicaraguan
press; see, for instance, Mairena Martínez (1999), Lara (2001), and the
editorial piece “Managua ya tiene 2 mil prostitutas” (2002).
19. The demobilization of the Contra (Resistencia Nacional) forces offi-
cially ended June 27, 1990. The reduction of the ESP and the demobi-
lization of its soldiers took place between 1990 and 1993. Silvia Gianni
observes that like the Sandinista ex combatants, the demilitarized ex con-
tras had to incorporate into civil life without any institutional support. The
autor quotes the sister of Israel Galeano (who was one of the leaders of
“Resistencia Nicaragüense”): “nosotros pusimos los muertos y la oligarquía
puso los ministros, ahora estamos muriéndonos de hambre, pues los liber-
ales nos abandonaron en todos estos 16 años” (qtd. in Gianni 2007).
20. “Ways of life that can no longer presuppose formal waged or salaried
jobs, job permanence, and the discipline of labor find alternative discur-
sive practices in what Maffesoli calls the ‘conquest of the present.’ The
conquest of the present tries to abandon self-sacrifice as the mediation
necessary to achieve pleasure. It is profoundly distrustful of any public
discourse that call (sic) for the deferral of gratification for the sake of the
future…” (López 1995, p. 181).
21. “Paradójicamente, el disparo que le cortaba la vida, le permitía ubicar
la posición del francotirador (como en la guerra, así los cazábamos, era
lindo verlos por las miras telescópicas y ellos sin saber siquiera que eran
sus últimos segundos que les quedaban de la vida, tal vez chillaban), como
a mí, ahora…” (Galich 2001, p. 115); “Montó el percutor de su 38 espe-
cial […] y sin ningún miramiento, asco o contemplación, jaló el gatillo.
Perrarrenca se recordó las veces que hizo lo mismo con los heridos o pri-
sioneros en la guerra y resignado pensó que por lo menos se acababa toda
esta vaina, que a decir verdad, ya me estaba cansando…” (2001, p. 116).
22. See, for instance, the interview with Erick Aguirre: “el personaje de la
Guajira es muy simbólico, porque ella es realmente la mujer deseada […]
¿Y quién es la mujer deseada en aquella época? La Nicaragua, la Guajira es
entonces Nicaragua” (2007).
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identidades múltiples en dos novelas de Franz Galich.” Istmo. Revista virtual
de estudios literarios y culturales centroamericanos 15. http://istmo.denison.
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———. 2013. Rebel Cities. From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution.
London: Verso.
Henken, Ted A. 2009. “Review of from Afro-Cuban Rythms to Latin Jazz”, by
Raúl A. Fernández. Caribbean Studies 37, no. 1: 314–319.
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the Age of Neoliberalism.” A Contracorriente: Una revista de historia social
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n15/articulos/mackenbach.html.
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———. 2012. El arte de ficcionar: la novela contemporánea en Centromamérica.
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CHAPTER 6
Urban Debris and Networking

Imperialism in Un Arte de Hacer Ruinas
by Antonio José Ponte
Eduard Arriaga
The exploration of the city and the urban landscape is not a new topic
in Latin American literature and culture. In fact, the image of the city
and its connections to ideological, political and economic forces became
one of the main lenses through which scholars and critics such as Ángel
Rama or Alberto Flores Galindo read the region’s literary and cultural
production. Likewise, authors from the 1970s Latin American Boom,
such as Julio Cortázar, Carlos Fuentes or Guillermo Cabrera Infante, as
well as pre-Boom authors such as Roberto Arlt, Jorge Luis Borges, and
José Lezama Lima, among others, embodied what Ángel Rama defined
as a “cosmopolitan aesthetic” (2008, p. 21). Such type of an aesthetic
opposed, and in a certain sense also complemented, the so-called trans-
cultural endeavors that, according to Rama, intended to connect mod-
ern literary techniques with mythical conceptions and rural languages/
dynamics to decipher Latin America’s deep essence. It was the latter
E. Arriaga (*) 
Department of Global Languages and Cross-Cultural Studies,
University of Indianapolis, Indianapolis, IN, USA

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-92438-0_6
118 E. ARRIAGA
aesthetic, however, that stuck with the global reader and became the
image of what was considered “actual” Latin American literature.
Since the end of the twentieth century, Latin American fiction writers
have declared themselves at odds with stereotypes that portray them as nat-
ural producers of magical realism and narratives connected to rural land-
scapes. While the origin of the city, and particularly of the lettered city (see
Rama 1996; Franco 2002), seems to be located in the desire to organize
the territory—of the New World, of complex overlapped cultures, of new
locations “without name” and “logic”—Latin American writers in the late
twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first seem to have con-
sidered the city as a way to reorganize those ideological orders previously
imposed on a region that overflows its mythical images. These writers do
not see themselves as part of Macondo, a village full of magical possibili-
ties although with limited worldwide connections, but as dwellers of cities
belonging to several networks in the world of globalization (Fuguet and
Gómez 1996).1 Writers such as Roberto Bolaño, Santiago Roncagliolo
and Santiago Gamboa, among others, produce fictional representations
and images based on their own nomadic, transnational experiences of
cities and citizens that are constantly looking for their place in the world
and dwelling at the border of their own fantasies. Such representations
are connected to what Navia and Zimmerman have pointed out as a net-
work of fluxes and interests, where “individuals more than citizens become
nodes connected to global circuits” (2004, p. 2). But what happens when
those nodes are limited by the boundaries of the nation-state as a struc-
ture of control and regional localization? How do writers immersed in
such a dynamic of limitation—due to political, social or cultural reasons—
represent their cities and make them globally connected?
This chapter aims to respond to these and other questions by explor-
ing and analyzing Un Arte de hacer ruinas y otros cuentos by the Cuban
writer Antonio José Ponte. Contrary to contemporary transnational
nomadic authors writing from a complex Latin American point of view
about, and from, global cities, Ponte writes about, and from, Havana—a
globalized colonial city itself. In doing so, Ponte exiles himself into the
interior of Havana’s urban ruins in order to explore forgotten global
connections that make this city/island part of an imperial, political, social
and cultural network.
The case of Ponte, as well as of the wider Cuban literary and cultural
fields, is of great interest as a way to reflect on the effects of globalization
and postmodern deterritorialization in Cuba, a nation considered at odds
with such projects. In fact, from the 1959 Revolution onwards, Cuba
6 URBAN DEBRIS AND NETWORKING IMPERIALISM … 119
seems to have found its own global project connected to the discourse
of resistance and anti-imperialism. Such a project was developed on the
assumption of a binary struggle against forces that, from the opposite
end of the dichotomy, were embarked on a crusade against communism
in order to restore democracy and freedom as universal abstract values.
However, the Cuban project of liberation faced another apparently more
definitive change due to the events of the late 1980s and early 1990s—
for example, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the dissolution of the Soviet
Union—and the subsequent emergence of a neoliberal economic and
symbolic order. Ponte and other writers of the so-called Special Period
Fiction (Whitfield 2009) got caught in the uncertainty and paradoxical
deterritorialization of a Cuba committed to revolutionary struggles for
liberation and territorial sovereignty.
In his work, Ponte takes an aesthetic stand contrary to the socialist
realism that dominated the Cuban literary field from 1970 to 1975, a
period referred to as the “quinquenio gris” [five gray years] (Buckwalter-
Arias 2005, p. 110), and which had a huge impact on the island’s cul-
tural life. Such realism seems to be the byproduct of the Soviet influence
on the Revolution, as well as of the process of decolonization under-
stood by the Revolution as a way to overthrow oppressive, “non-real”
images imposed by colonial powers. Ponte, more sympathetic with aes-
thetic proposals such as those from the Orígenes literary group, aligns
himself with a vision of art as a human product that adds new layers to—
and in a certain sense creates, explains and refracts—one’s understand-
ing of reality. Through his vision, a sort of Caribbean romantic aesthetic,
Ponte reflects about the city, the urban landscape and human nature in
constant dispute with Nature’s own forces. It is from such a vision that
Ponte manages to bring up and make visible the global, transnational
and transcultural connections of a city such as Havana, which lies appar-
ently disconnected by the imposition of the US embargo, as well as by
the decline of the Soviet Union and the globalization of neoliberalism.
Cities and Ideas in Latin America:

Between Rises, Falls, Declines and Ruins
Argentinean historian José Luis Romero published his now classic
Latinoamérica: las ciudades y la ideas in the 1970s on the eve of the mil-
itary coup. In that work, Romero sought to answer the question about
the role played by cities and the urban landscape in Latin America.
Opposing the dichotomy civilization versus barbarism developed by
120 E. ARRIAGA
Latin American social Darwinists such as Domingo F. Sarmiento in his

Facundo (1845), Romero argues that cities and urban societies in the
region are not in opposition to rural settlements and societies. Rather,
the urban landscape, he suggests, evolves and changes not only as an
autonomous entity but also as a system determined by the influences of
the rural world. It is through such interplay that cultures, subcultures
and ideologies emerge in urban centers that, in turn, become complex
organizations connected to national, regional or even global networks.
In defining the Latin American city, Romero argues that it was ini-
tially conceived as an instrument of conquest, used to put an order in a
space considered chaotic or, even worse, empty. However, such an ini-
tial imagination—the city as an ideal and imaginary space—becomes a
real city that is constantly transformed due to various influences. Cities
as material and symbolic systems are constantly subject to many influ-
ences: “foreign influences; influence of the socioeconomic structures
represented by commerce, capitalist, and bourgeois ideologies; influence
of the great fluxes of ideas and ideologies—in a non-bipartisan sense—
particularly those created and exported from Europe to Latin America”
(Romero 2004, p. 15). In that sense, Latin American cities first thought
of as instruments with particular functions—that of being a harbor, or a
fort or military outpost, a mining city, and so forth—evolved to become
urban landscapes where ideas, ethnicities, and social processes over-
lapped, creating new social connections and artistic representations.
The Uruguayan literary critic Ángel Rama goes a step further to try
to explain the evolution of the Latin American city as always connected
to the power of the written word. In his posthumous work La ciudad
letrada (The Lettered City), he argues that the city must be understood
as a two-way system: (a) a physical system based on the distribution of
space, and (b) a symbolic system based on imagination and technologies
such as writing. However, for Rama, the latter seems to be more impor-
tant in that it also defines the former. Rama argues, “Before becoming
a material reality of houses, streets, and plazas […] Latin American cit-
ies sprang forth in signs and plans, already complete in the documents
that laid their statutory foundations and in the charts and plans that
established their ideal designs” (1996, p. 8). From his perspective, Latin
American cities—as utopias—existed well before their material existence
thanks to the power of the symbol. Although Rama accepted that cities
change in terms of physical space, he contended that the essence of the
symbolic power behind their emergence remained unchanged even if it
was concealed by various disguises: what once started as the product of

imagination, of writing, and of charts and maps, evolved to become a
symbolic space based on laws; what once was the product of cartogra-
phers, scribes and chroniclers became the space where the lettered class
(intellectuals, writers, lawyers, etc.) was considered a model for political,
social and economic development (1996, p. 51). From Rama’s perspec-
tive, it is that trope—the lettered city—that serves as a foundation from
which to understand Latin American cultural changes, particularly with
respect to the region’s literary and cultural production.
Despite its popularity and success in academic circles, what Rama
once called the “lettered city” seems to fall short in capturing the diver-
sity and complexity of the actual Latin American city. According to Silvia
Spitta, Rama forgets the “real city” is made up of diversity, complex-
ity, discursive disparity and overlapping symbolic systems, in order to
assign the lettered class a ubiquitous controlling power (2003, p. 16).
Such a perspective ignores processes of appropriation and subversion of
language, writing and other symbolic systems by non-lettered citizens
with diverse epistemic and cultural perspectives coexisting in the urban
space. In his Ciudad sumergida: Aristocracia y plebe en Lima. 1760–1830
Alberto Flores Galindo refers to legal accounts and judicial documents
to propose that the law and the practice of law cannot be thought of as
a one-dimensional system imposed by the dominant class. On the con-
trary, he argues that the law and the legal system, both based on writ-
ing as technology and epistemology, were flawed and essentially broken
“especially in a society where several cultural systems coexist and norms
of behavior are in constant tension” (qtd. in Spitta 2003, p. 21).
In that sense, the ideal and ordered city proposed by Rama to explain
the historical and cultural evolution of Latin American urban land-
scapes becomes deconstructed by more complex approaches that look at
citizens as active human beings, as opposed to obedient actors. Those
deconstructions do not take place only at an abstract level, but also, and
to a much greater degree overall, at concrete political and economic lev-
els. For instance, Jean Franco in her Decline and Fall of the Lettered City
shows how, since the end of the 1950s and the beginning of the 1960s,
Latin American changing urban conceptions displaced the lettered city
from the center to the periphery. What once was considered the dom-
inant class, capable of determining the shape of the city, became just
another group of citizens within the masses that constitute populations
in a connected world polarized by the effects of local interests presented
122 E. ARRIAGA
as global (e.g. the Cold War, the liberalization of markets, the emer-
gence and increasing importance of communication technologies, etc.).
In literary terms, those displacements are represented by the emergence
of “subaltern accounts, testimonios, popular texts, and other discourses
excluded from the canon” (García Canclini 2001, p. 8; Franco 2002,
p. 11). In urban, political and cultural terms, cities became global, citi-
zens became consumers and identities started to be considered fluid, par-
tially determined by what is being consumed. In that process of change,
constant movement and connection, cities as well as nations begin both
to create new spaces and destroy old ones. The physical and symbolic
spaces that are destroyed become ruins, which are inhabited and from
which Un arte nuevo de hacer ruinas emerges to fictionalize the sensation
of scandal and tragedy that accompanies such ruination.
Narrating the Ruins of an Imperial Caribbean City

In introducing, Año 0, a new collection of novels written by contempo-
rary Latin American writers narrating global cities, Mondadori’s editor,
Claudio López, pointed out that none of the writers in charge of cre-
ating those novels chose her/his city of origin (2002). Narrating a city
other than your own, López continues, would be worthy of a project
that expected to show the literary image of global cities from a Latin
American point of view. According to Saskia Sassen, what constitutes a
global city is the change of landscape imposed by emergence, flow, and
connection of capitals, communities and communications, displacing the
traditional geography of what a city was in its national conception. In
other words, “major cities have emerged as strategic sites not only for
global capital, but also for the transnationalization of labor and the for-
mation of translocal communities and identities” (Sassen 2005, p. 37).
In that sense, the project by Mondadori was in tune with the political,
economic, social and cultural dynamics brought about by so-called glo-
balization and its narratives of “development fantasized as a journey into
prosperity” (Franco 2002, p. 15).
Contrary to the idea behind the project of Mondadori, Antonio José
Ponte narrates Havana—a place that does not fit the traditional defini-
tion of global city—2 from the local/global perspective of narrators
and characters constantly connected to the world. Published in 2005
by Fondo de Cultura Económica, Un arte de hacer ruinas is a short
story collection divided into two main parts: “Cuentos de todas partes
del imperio” (Short Stories from All Over the Empire), made up of five
stories, one prologue and one epilogue; and “Corazón de Skitalietz”
(Skitalietz’s Heart) made up of five short stories and a novella. In only
two of those thirteen stories is the city presented as the center of the nar-
rative: “Un arte de hacer ruinas,” which gives its name to the collection,
and “Corazón de Skatalietz,” the title of the second section. For the rest
of the stories, the urban landscape is insinuated as having an impact on
the behaviors, feelings and actions of the characters. In a remarkable
move, Ponte uses Un arte de hacer ruinas to represent Havana, a city
thought of as disconnected from neoliberal global circuits, as part of an
imperial network that, in its expansions and contractions, manages to dis-
perse citizens and create inhabited urban debris.
In her prologue to the 2005 edition of Un arte de hacer rui-
nas, Esther Whitfield asks “¿qué es y dónde se encuentra ese imperio
cubano…?” (2005, p. 9). Ponte himself responds to that question in
interviews, essays, and in the shorts stories that comprise the collection.
At odds with Ángel Rama’s idea that the city exists as a result of the
power of writing, Ponte proposes that his stories, his writings exist and
can only be explained because of the actuality of the empire. The empire
consists of “ese aroma amargo que sale de las tazas, en el humo picante
del tabaco, en palabras, en música, en aire, en fin, en todo” (2005a,
p. 41). Such a domain is made up of imaginations, memories and stories.
At the same time, the city is a physical space and an imaginary location
where all the reminiscences take place and come together. However, the
city is also fashioned by the characters and narrators in each of the sto-
ries, who draw and define its limits and its connections to the empire.
In “Lagrimas en el congrí,” for instance, the narrator assesses his pres-
ent condition on the island from the perspective of his previous experi-
ence as an exchange student of atomic physics in Russia. Remarkably, the
narrator reflects on how physically departing a space does not actually
mean leaving it. As part of a “tribe” of Cuban students (los cabecitas de
congrí) created to survive in a foreign country, the narrator reflects that
“conseguíamos vivir como si no hubiéramos dejado atrás nuestra tierra”
(2005a, p. 44). In the same vein, in “Por hombres,” another story in
which exile and return are fundamental topics, one of the characters
comes back to the island after a long trip in search of her true self. In
the airport’s bathroom, she meets the narrator, to whom she tells her
travel adventures. To express her impressions about the empire, this par-
ticular character says “La locura me dio por pensar que los que viajaban,
124 E. ARRIAGA
y las maletas, y los aviones estaban allá afuera, para hacerme creer que
existían otros países, cuando había uno solo y era este” (2005a, p. 51).
In her account, the empire is marked by the power of her own land
overshadowing the existence of all other countries and locations in the
world. Such a traveler realizes that leaving or trying to negate the exist-
ence of her country is impossible because it is an empire that extends
its tentacles far beyond its physical boundaries; the empire is everywhere
because all travelers leaving the island carry it inside them. That is pre-
cisely why, by the end of the story, the character asserts that “Islandia
es el fin del mundo, pero incluso en el fin del mundo encontré gente
de aquí” (2005a, p. 54). Like in the powerful narrative pieces of the
Latin American Boom and the post-Boom, such as Viaje a la Habana
by Reinaldo Arenas or Rayuela by Julio Cortázar, Ponte’s characters
are always tied to their homeland. Although they leave their country of
origin and spend time abroad, they always come back, and even when
they are not able to return, they remain Cubans/Argentineans wherever
they go.
Contrary to contemporary Latin American writers who want to
explore the global city by naming and speaking about “global” loca-
tions, Ponte manages to use local images, and sometimes just insinuated
locations, to highlight the global condition of an island that became
the center of the Global South project for liberation. As Lievesley pro-
poses, after the Revolution, Cuba “was committed to the restructuring
of the international system in order to empower the poor states of Latin
America, Asia and Africa” (2004, p. 14). Such a commitment implied
the configuration of an alternative global design (an alternative empire)
to defy the order inherited from the beginning of the twentieth century,
an order that was accentuated after the end of the Cold War through the
imposition of ideologies and economic systems of global development.
It is in that panorama that Ponte proposes the existence of an empire (a
Cuban empire) with global connections, as well as with local impacts and
global images.
In Ponte’s proposal, the city—sometimes a central character, some-
times a backdrop or an insinuated dynamic in which the actions take
place—seems to be at the center of that empire. The urban space is not
only where those international and transatlantic travelers return, or the
place where those countryside dwellers want to come in search of new
opportunities. It is also a type of force that moves subjects to act or liv-
ens up other spaces that would otherwise be considered phantasmagoric.
In the short story “Estación H” Ponte writes that “La estación H se alza
a medio camino entre dos ciudades […] el lugar cobra vida solamente
con el cruce de los trenes” (2005a, p. 133). In that passage, he shows
how those spaces between cities come alive thanks to the influence of
cities and travelers who commute. Commuters bring back with them
parts of the city, or, when they are city-bound, contribute to building/
destroying it. In any case, the city becomes a multilevel space that offers
a variety of experiences, attracting people who want to both live in it
and escape from it. That is precisely what happens with the characters
who appear in Un arte de hacer ruinas: they seem to want to fly away, to
escape, to go beyond the city; but the city—the center of the empire—
hunts them down. “Verdad que cada día es más duro salir de la Habana”
(2005a, p. 161), says one of the characters in “Corazón de Skatalietz,”
while the narrator confirms that Veranda and Escorpión, the story’s pro-
tagonists, “tenían el deseo de viajar y sin embargo se les hacía imposible
salir de la ciudad” (2005a, p. 171).
It is in the interplay of those forces that the ruins and the debris
emerge. Wanting to leave the city, the island, and the empire is opposed,
in a certain sense, by the desire to stay and the impossibility to leave.
Inspired by the romantic conception of ruins, Ponte uses the trope to
question, to evaluate, and to protest his own political, social and cultural
context. According to José Luis Marzo, the contemplation of ruins by
romantic poets, artists and philosophers “is not only the manifestation
of despair or the acknowledgement of human limitations but also and
over all the materialization of a protest against a period, their own, that
makes them feel disappointed” (1989, p. 51). Although Ponte’s char-
acters do not seem to be protesting, they are represented as constantly
disappointed with their limitations, and, at the same time, with the far-
reaching arm of the empire that manages to follow them wherever they
go. In that sense, the making of ruins is not only the effect that Nature
and time have on what humans build, but above all a human strategy to
look for alternatives and to delay the passage of time or challenge the
impossibility of change.
In explaining the concept of ruins, Florence M. Hetzler argues,
“a ruin is defined as the disjunctive product of the intrusion of nature
upon an edifice without loss of the unity produced by the human build-
ers” (1988, p. 51). In that sense, the ruins emerge from the connection
between human action (building), natural effects (dust, rain, snow, etc.)
and time. From Hetzler’s perspective, time, due to its multiplicity, is one
126 E. ARRIAGA
of the most important elements to take into account when considering

ruins: it is the cause, effect, and inhabits human time in confluence with
cosmological time. On the one hand, time as cause must be understood
as the force of nature and the passing of minutes, hours, days, weeks
and years as having a toll on structures and architectural creations. On
the other hand, time as effect is considered the internal perspective cre-
ated by ruins, which also manage to connect past, present and future in
a sort of cycle and organic relationship with earth. “Ruin time creates
the future of a ruin, even the return of the man-made part to the earth
which will eventually claim what is its property” (Hetzler 1988, p. 54).
Finally, those connections serve as a point of departure from which ruins
are incorporated into the creation of human time as a way to understand
our existence and our role in this world.
In Ponte’s representation, however, ruins are more complex than the
juxtaposition of times described by Hetzler, who discusses ruins from the
perspective of art and the classical tradition. In those traditions, ruins are
seen as the outcome of Nature’s and time’s impact on human creation.
In turn, those creations affected by natural phenomena become symbolic
spaces constantly visited by observers to be reminded of their inherent
human limitations. In his short stories, however, Ponte does not repre-
sent ruins as buildings that have become monuments to be observed,
but rather as ruins created by humans as an alternative to living. In fact,
these ruins are neither abandoned nor restored to serve museum-like
purposes. Ponte’s ruins are destroyed spaces in which his characters live,
reflect and die. These spaces are important, but so are the human beings
who inhabit them and become part of them; these beings become ruins
themselves, transforming the city and the urban perspective that trav-
erses all the stories. In that sense, the city and the urban representation
of Havana emerge from the double connection between symbolic and
physical levels as pointed out by Armando Silva (2006, p. 26).3 Ponte
is not only reflecting on what happens in the physical space of the city,
but also representing, creating, the ruins that surround him and that are
inside him and all other city dwellers who, despite running away to other
locations in the world, will be constantly hunted down by the power that
managed to create the ruins in the first place: the empire.4
In representing the urban space and the Cuban ruins, Ponte explores
the two levels mentioned previously: the physical and the symbolic.
The former traverses the way the latter is formed and experienced.
However, the physical space is concretely represented in the story “Un
arte de hacer ruinas” that gives the title to the collection. It is a satiric
story and a detective narrative that shows how the ruins are not only the
outcome of natural effects on buildings, but also of a human attempt
to take control of their existence. It is the “tugures”—another tribe
that in this case is located at home—who create the ruins, who inter-
vene with buildings in order to break them down as a way to continue
with their “nomadic spirit” (2005a, p. 66). However, the impossibility
of moving around and leaving for other parts of the world make them
look for alternatives: “si no puedes salir entonces entra” (2005a, p. 66),
reflects the narrator. Wandering around the city and witnessing how its
dwellers die under collapsing buildings but still fight to live in them, the
narrator concludes that the existence of such a city, with sparse founda-
tions that support more than they were designed to, is only understand-
able by flotation as a way of existing (2005a, p. 63). The destruction of
the material city goes hand in hand with the reconstruction and exist-
ence of the symbolic urban space. In the case of the story, it is a book
(“Tratado de estética milagrosa,” written by the narrator’s tutor) that
explains how the city manages to continue existing even under the ruins.
Reading and discovering such a book makes the narrator come to the
realization that all those who have read it are dead, and that all that is
happening around the city—the demolition of buildings, the creation of
ruins, etc.— is explained there. When the book disappears and his tutor
dies, the narrator starts to investigate; he eventually faces the reality of
his city: it is being destroyed to create a new underground city that in a
certain sense is similar to the one above. Based on the similarity of the
two (one above and the other below), the narrator thinks that the under-
ground city called “Tuguria” must have been “planeada por quienes cau-
saban los derrumbes” (2005a, p. 72). With this idea of two cities, one
feeding on the destruction of the other, one on the surface and the other
underground, Ponte sets up the center from which material and symbolic
orders make up the urban space he describes throughout the collection.
The other story that serves as a link connecting those two levels is
“Corazón de Skitalietz,” which tells the city-wide journey of a historian
(Escorpión) and a psychic (Veranda) in search of themselves. These two
characters representing past and future decided to live in the present by
obeying their heart of skatalietz in order to get to know a city that is
multiple in nature. “¿No sientes que no existe future ni pasado? ¿Que
presente es lo único que tenemos?” (Ponte 2005a, p. 170), Veranda asks
Escorpión while walking around the city. Veranda and Escorpión become
128 E. ARRIAGA
skatalietz, quitting their assigned social responsibilities of telling the

future (the psychic) and shedding light on the past (the historian). They
do this to explore cities they knew existed but were forbidden to visit:
plazas, unknown streets, mental institutions and cities that make up the
larger city and lie within it. Skatalietz, the narrator explains, is a Russian
concept adapted to the Cuban city. The word means those who become
“vagabundos, desheredados que no mueren, no se matan, pero que se
desentienden de sus posesiones?” (2005a, p. 168). Ponte adopts the per-
spective of these vagabonds to explain how the city is not only in ruins
because its architecture is falling apart, but also because the citizens are
becoming part of those ruins. In that sense, the author comes full cir-
cle to explain the interplay between the symbolic and material levels that
creates urban spaces fully connected to a global network of decadence
and ruins.
In the rest of the stories, Ponte shows how human beings, and par-
ticularly his fellow citizens, are walking around and talking about ruins
that go to a variety of places in the world but are always connected to
their decadent Cuban city. The reader will find stories that range from
absurd accounts of people ordering furniture in a given house as a way to
communicate, to stories of trains that connect cities and citizens who, in
turn, bring perspectives that contribute to the city’s collapse. The ruins
are connected to stories of lovers who escape from the Cuban China
Town to go in search of elephant hearts while fighting against colonial-
ism somewhere in the African jungle. The ruins are also linked to groups
of citizens that get together in barbershops to tell stories about the
empire and at the same time to snitch on their comrades who are part of
the underground city. A city that is rooted not only in the materiality of
the destruction but also in the secrecy of the actions involved. It is only
through the narration, that such a global empire of ruins takes place,
even if Ponte contends that it is because of the existence of the empire
that his accounts exist.
Networking the Ruins: Global Publishing

and Local Anonymity
The novels published under Mondadori’s Año 0 series seem to have a

clear circuit of production based on the marketing strategies and ideas to
move the Latin American literary field forward. Writing about the urban
experience and global cities such as Mexico City, Moscow and Peking
seems to be a way to attract readers and writers to a topic of their pref-

erence (López 2002). In the case of Ponte’s collection, however, the
circuit is not so transparent and the connections are not as local as one
would think. On the contrary, Ponte’s collection is an example of how
current publishing dynamics, traversed by deterritorialization, global
connections and flows of information, manage to create readerships and
connect communities outside the boundaries of the nation.
In “Cuban Narrative and Post-Soviet Cultural Politics,” James
Buckwalter-Arias discusses the introductory remarks of the 1998 sum-
mer issue of the Madrid-based Cuban journal Encuentros to show how
the cultural production of the island—closely connected to migratory
movements—has been displaced and carried out from locations outside
the island itself. Encuentros’s editor in chief, Jesús Díaz, affirmed in the
opening statement that Cuban literature “está de fiesta” (“is on a roll”),
because of several literary recognitions awarded to Cuban writers at the
time of the publication: Cabrera Infante had won the Premio Cervantes;
Raúl Rivero, the Journalist Without Borders award; Eliseo Alberto,
the Alfaguara award; and Daína Chaviano was given the Azorín award
(Buckwalter-Arias 2005, p. 362). All the successes pointed out by Díaz,
contends Buckwalter-Arias, originated outside Cuba, which meant that
the fiesta “was not taking place in” the island, even though the journal
was celebrating Cuban literature.
Buckwalker-Arias’s article explains how the island’s center for cul-
tural production/dissemination was displaced due to the effects of the
Special Period characterized by economic sanctions, the disappearance
of Soviet sponsorship and the increasing pressure exerted by global cor-
porations outside Cuba interested in its cultural production. The 1959
Cuban Revolution founded a system of cultural creation, conservation
and dissemination whose central idea was that of promoting resist-
ance and consolidating alternative conceptions of culture in a world
traversed by capitalist and colonial markets. The Cuban Revolutionary
government, then, created and modified institutions such as the Cuban
Institute of Film (ICAIC), the National Union of Writers and Artists
of Cuba (UNEAC) and the world-renown Casa de las Américas. Those
institutions gathered artists, writers, filmmakers and cultural agents not
only from the island, but also from around the world and particularly
from the Global South. The role played by these institutions in fostering
education around the world, as well as in becoming a force uniting pro-
cesses of cultural resistance, was remarkable. Several authors, including
130 E. ARRIAGA
those from the Latin American literary Boom of the 1970s, were closely
allied to the activities carried out by these agencies. However, accord-
ing to Buckwalker-Arias’s analysis of Encuentros, “Cruz’s celebratory
rhetoric [heralds] the death of that collective project” (2005, p. 362).
What had been the center and the model of cultural production in
Latin America was displaced to metropolitan centers such as Madrid
and Barcelona, cities representing a world order that the revolutionary
Latin American project had considered on its way out for a long period
of time. However, the practices of art, literature and of the cultural field,
in general, showed the failure of utopian projects of liberation and the
reemergence of new/old world orders of cultural production and dis-
semination: Latin American literature and cultural production was once
again determined by the guidelines produced in the metropolises outside
the continent.5
Those able to leave the island continued to write and create in exile,
becoming part of publishing circuits whose centers grew increasingly
complex.6 In contrast, those who stayed experienced a reduction of
possibilities to publish and disseminate their work, due to the break-
down suffered by the institutions mentioned above which affected such
institutions’ apparent capacity to impact global audiences,7 and the
ban imposed by the revolutionary government on aesthetic and politi-
cal ideas that differed from those mandated by the state. If the writers
in exile managed to get connected to global publishing circuits, those
who stayed on the island were left searching for alternatives in order to
remain current and active writers.
In the case of José Antonio Ponte, his alternatives to create a net-
work of publication and dissemination were determined by both the
limitations inside the country and the possible connections outside of
it. Armed with “phone and email” (Ponte 2011), as the interview by
Abel Gilbert shows, Ponte decided to connect with those external nodes
to avoid official censors, as well as the economic and ideological limi-
tations of the official Cuban cultural field. One of the most important
partners in disseminating his work and opening the door for him to be
a writer once again was the magazine Encuentros. As a Cuban magazine
published in Spain, Encuentros gave Ponte the opportunity to reach a
readership that could include Cubans in exile or non-Cubans interested
in reading contemporary Cuban literature. In addition, such an outlet
allowed for a combination of literature, discussions about politics, social
life and other topics that Cuban official publications would not accept.
“Cuban journals published on the island and by institutions such as

UNEAC or the Ministry of Culture,” Ponte argues, “try to avoid peo-
ple and intellectuals who think critically about Cuban society” (Ponte
2005b, p. 32).
Encuentros allowed not only such critical engagements, but also the
possibility of showcasing the wide range of Ponte’s work: from essays to
poetry, and novels to short stories. Likewise, by showcasing his work,
some global publishing houses, such as Fondo de Cultura Económica,
or publishers from other linguistic traditions became interested in his
work, allowing him to publish some of it abroad. Ponte has stated that
all his poetry was published in Cuba, but that since the publication of
Las comidas profundas (Éditions Deleatur, 1997) “I started to publish
my work outside Cuba. One of the reasons for this is that international
publishing houses started to become more interested in Cuban literature.
Another is that, for several years, Cuban outlets have not published what
I have been writing” (Ponte 2002, p. 185). Ponte was gradually ostra-
cized from the Cuban literary field and cultural life, pushing him to live
in a sort of paradoxical state of exile without even leaving a Havana that
became his shelter.
But Encuentros and the global connections to publishers were by no
means the only possibilities for him to build a network of dissemination
for his poetry and writing. In the case of the city as a topic and the ruins
as a poetic/political trope and image, it is possible to affirm that Ponte
goes beyond the limitations and possibilities of the written text, adopt-
ing a type of transmedia perspective that allows him to convey his liter-
ary, political and cultural message. A case in point is the documentary
Havana: The New Art of Making Ruins by German filmmaker Florian
Borchemeyer. The documentary, inspired by both Ponte’s short story
as well as by Borchemeyer’s personal experience living on the island,8
features five main characters that live in, and speak about, the ruins in
Havana. Antonio José Ponte is one of those characters, and in a certain
sense, he acts as the guide for the filmmakers’ journey through the city.
When Ponte first appears in the documentary, he introduces himself
as a “ruinologist.” “Drawing on a Eurocentric tradition of classic bour-
geois culture, Ponte compares ruin-gazing to life among them. For him
the consideration of deserted ruins allows cultural and self-reflection”
(Christoph 2010, p. 219). The film goes on presenting each of the char-
acters and interviewing about their urban, political and social perspec-
tives on Cuba. In addition to the interviews, the documentary creates
132 E. ARRIAGA
an image of the Cuban ruins by overlapping pictures of the interview-

ees and the buildings falling apart, along with footage of Havana in the
1950s as a point of contrast and nostalgic evaluation of the city’s evo-
lution. The film narrative, proposes Christoph, “differs from Ponte’s
in two ways”: (a) the complex design created by Ponte in connecting
Havana to a transnational archeology of ruins is narrowed down by the
film to an action of mapping contemporary ruinous structures; and (b)
the narrative proposed by the film, unlike Ponte’s, “vacillates between
figurative and literal, artistic and sociological, feature and documentary”
(2010, p. 219). Such a comment is not intended to judge the quality of
either of the two works (the film and the short story collection), but,
on the contrary, to show how the value of transmedia, as proposed by
Henry Jenkins, resides in the “unique contribution” of each medium to
the unfolding of the story (Transmedia Lab 2017). In the case of Ponte’s
work and Bochermeyer’s film, both contribute to tell the story about the
Cuban ruins and its many angles of interpretation: political, economic,
cultural, social and artistic.
In one of the passages of the film, Ponte argues that he has been pre-
vented from writing in his country, that he became an unknown writer
in Cuba. He connects such an experience of being silenced and ostra-
cized as a writer to the urban experience of what is happening with
Havana and its ruins. In an interview with Teresa Basile, Ponte reminds
the reader that he, as a Cuban writer, used to be part of the UNEAC.
However, after publishing some of his poems and short stories on the
island, Ponte was expelled from the union with the excuse that he had
been “deactivated” as writer. “The socialist bureaucracy, Ponte contends,
is the best at making up euphemistic terms […] deactivation is a military
term; it is also a term used to turn electrical appliances on and off […]
it is a term that belongs to a mind that manages blackouts and, there-
fore, knows what—and what not—to deactivate” (2005b, p. 32). Being
expelled from the UNEAC and condemned to not being published by
any Cuban outlet is seen by Ponte as the perfect example of how the
Cuban government makes, and has been making, ruins out of spaces,
buildings and people. It is precisely that condition of being an anony-
mous writer at home and a famous Cuban writer outside the island that
gives flesh to his work, to his short stories and to his account of the city.
It is from that vision that Ponte manages to represent urban debris and
a networking imperialism that pauperizes and in a certain sense destroys
everything. Urban ruins, in the Cuban case, are part of what he calls
the strategy of the Revolution to stage a war that has not happened and
probably will not happen but whose destruction is evident.
José Antonio Ponte left the island and settled in Spain in 2006, one
year after the publication of his short story collection by the Fondo de
Cultura Económica in Mexico. Although he is now an actual exile, living
in another city and connected to other freedoms and limitations, Ponte
will continue to be part of that empire he represented in his stories. He
is now a diplomat of the empire, and the city in ruins will continue to fall
apart because Ponte, as a writer and an artist, immortalized such ruins
and took them with him. Much like the characters in his own short sto-
ries, he will travel the world, but he will also continue to be connected to
that city that is now part of a global network of ruins in a world full of
decay and detritus.
Notes
1. While Macondo is seen by authors such as Fuguet as a trope limited in
connection to the sporadic appearances of Melquiades the gypsy, what they
propose is the understanding of a region that is highly connected to the
world through several networks: of communications, of the economy and,
most important, of drug trafficking.
2. One of the most traditional and accepted conceptions of global city
comes from Saskia Sassen (2005), who understands it as a category
highly connected to global economic trends that belong to the so-called
Globalization. Although Havana does not coincide with the seven hypoth-
eses she proposes to study global cities, the Cuban city represents an alter-
native globalization in which tourism and a central connection to the
Global South become fundamental elements to reconsider the effects and
actions of global economic and cultural trends.
3. This connection between spatial and symbolic is the point of departure
employed by Ángel Rama to develop his analysis of Latin American cities.
Romero, however, goes beyond the limits of the written word and the let-
tered epistemology to explore diverse semiotics and processes of meaning
construction, and particularly to advertising in the city and other contem-
porary symbolic systems.
4. In the documentary Havana: The New Art of Making Ruins, José Antonio
Ponte argues that the Cuban ruins are a sort of governmental strategy
to keep the Cuban population in a state of constant contemplation and
lack of action. He advances such an argument in his short stories but con-
nected to the idea of the empire as a power that extends beyond the limits
of the nation, chasing its dwellers to any location of the world they move
134 E. ARRIAGA
to. Ruins are not only material debris but also symbolic burden that goes
inside Cubans in exile, creating networks with global ruins. In that sense,
the empire is an overarching presence without specific form or identity.
5. Madrid, and especially Barcelona, have been central for the development
of a Latin American literary field. However, it is from the 1960s onward
that these cities became centers for the creation and publication of Latin
American literature. Pablo Sánchez points out three fundamental factors
that facilitated this: (a) The Seix Barral award granted to Mario Vargas
Llosa in 1962; (b) a new publication strategy by Carlos Barral that made
Latin American literature the main product to be marketed in Spain and
Europe; (c) and the emergence of figures such as Carmen Balcells, a liter-
ary agent who played a fundamental role in fostering the careers, and writ-
ing as a professional occupation, for Latin American writers (2008, p. 53).
6. See my work on the Colombian literary field, Las redes del gusto (2013),
which shows how the globalization of markets directly affected national
literary fields and the way literature was read locally, and how it was pro-
duced there or in metropolitan centers.
7. The supposed “death” of these institutions deserves more research, as
some of them remain active, granting awards and playing an important
role in Latin American culture.
8. Borchmeyer revealed that his interest in ruins motivated him to study
abroad in Havana in order to live in a socialist country “before the wall
falls,” referring to his experience as a German citizen and his connection to
the Berlin Wall (Christoph 2010, p. 218).
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Arriaga, Eduard, and Yamilet Angulo. 2012. Las redes del gusto. La novela en
Colombia: 1990–2005. Bogotá: Universidad Distrital Francisco José de Caldas.
Borchmeyer, Florian. 2006. Havana: The New Art of Making Ruins. DVD.
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———. 2005a. Un arte de hacer ruinas y otros cuentos. México: Fondo de
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———. 2005b. “Entrevista a Antonio José Ponte” by Teresa Basile. Katatay 1,
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CHAPTER 7
Place-Making in the Solitude of the City:

Valeria Luiselli’s Los ingrávidos
Cecily Raynor
Valeria Luiselli’s Los ingrávidos (2011) is embedded in the urban.1 From

New York to Mexico City to Philadelphia, the city operates as a canvas
for the unraveling of a story that cuts across time and space. At its heart
is also a hunt, one in which a nameless writer in contemporary Mexico
City collides regularly with Gilberto Owen, a barely known Mexican
poet in the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and 1930s New York City.
Unlike the poetic obsessions of Roberto Bolaño’s Los detectives salvajes,
Owen is a real person who worked as a Mexican diplomat and poet dur-
ing the early to mid-twentieth century.2 The narrator’s interest in him
quickly evolves into an obsession in which the two begin to lead parallel
lives, encountering one another in real and imagined cityscapes, in the
subway and in material artifacts left behind from other eras. The chase so
crucial to this novel is one that is acutely literary, and also one that deals
with the role of writing from abroad that is so essential to contemporary
Latin America, a region that regularly engages themes of exile, travel and
expatriate life.
C. Raynor (*) 
McGill University, Montreal, QC, Canada

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-92438-0_7
138 C. RAYNOR
In line with other contemporary Latin American authors, includ-

ing Rodrigo Fresán and Roberto Bolaño, Luiselli uses micro-narratives
to tell this story, executed with a precision that allows her to connect
recurring themes and perspectives across vast expanses. While the story
can be difficult to properly scale within a singular conception of time, its
varied urban spaces act as a type of anchor, guiding it forward. In fact,
each vignette—separated by asterisks and blank spaces on the page—
occupies its own sphere, its own place. This chapter examines the con-
nection between form, musings on the literary and representations
of urban places in the novel. By making places out of the spaces of the
city in its multiple representations, Luiselli’s debut work ruminates on
broader literary questions in Latin America, including the creation and
dissemination of literary texts, the art of translation and the value of writ-
ing outside of the canon.
Hunting for Narrative Space:

Writing Beyond the Canon
Los ingrávidos unfolds in fragments, in a series of vignettes that disrupt
their predecessors as readers travel from story to story. In the literal
disruption of the first page, an unnamed narrator speaks of a boy wak-
ing her from slumber to ask her about the origin of mosquitos (2011,
p. 11). Separating the initial five-sentence fragment from the next is an
asterisk on the page, transporting readers to another story, as the narra-
tive voice recounts, “Todo empezó en otra ciudad y en otra vida” (2011,
p. 11). This simple layering of vignettes informs readers from the get-go
that there are (at least) two stories at hand. The first fragment is written
in the present tense, and the second, written in the past, a marking that
feels conscientious and deliberate. The third fragment digs ever deeper
into the other life of the second, moving readers to the urban staple of
an apartment, “En esa ciudad vivía sola en un departamento casi vacío.
Dormía poco. Comía mal y sin variar mucho. Llevaba una vida sencilla,
una rutina. Trabajaba como dictaminadora y traductora en una editorial
pequeña que se dedicaba a rescatar ‘perlas extranjeras’ que nadie com-
praba” (2011, p. 11). Thus, already by the end of the first page, readers
learn that the novel is varied in perspective and also immediately literary.
One quickly understands that the narrator works in letters at the inter-
section of translation and readership, a type of translation that is not
lucrative and for which the market is scant. The perceived difficulty of
7 PLACE-MAKING IN THE SOLITUDE OF THE CITY … 139
this occupation gives one pause for reflection; not only is the narrator
embedded in letters, but in the subset of foreign translation that is car-
ried out almost solely in dedication to the craft, without much prospect
of financial gain. Later on, as her hunt for Gilberto Owen takes center
stage, the novel becomes a meta-reflection on the importance of assign-
ing value to writers that fall outside of the world literary canon. Not only
does Owen have little prominence within Mexican or Latin American lit-
erature, but his marginalization is compounded by the infrequency with
which his subset of literature is translated into English. As such, Owen
embodies the notion that non-popularized and undiscovered writing has
value. To take this idea a step further, the work acts as a homage to the
very obscurity that this poet symbolizes, to the idea that creative expres-
sion has inherent worth regardless of immediate or long-term readership.
The author’s commitment to researching Owen’s life and translat-
ing his body of work soon takes a personal turn; readers have the sense
that the young woman is on a quest to rescue him from anonymity
while seeking something within his story that could illuminate her own.
Literary critic Regina Cardoso Nelkey ruminates on the duality of this
search, noting that it is fractured into two voices, that of Owen (through
the narrator) and that of the narrator herself (2014, p. 77). This is fur-
ther complicated by the various temporal moments at work; the present
in which the narrator lives in Mexico City with her unnamed husband,
young child and infant, and her past life in New York City working in
the publishing house. Throughout Los ingrávidos, temporalities over-
lap as these two chronologically disparate narratives unfold and collide.
Furthermore, readers are confronted with the two past lives of Owen
which the narrator slowly uncovers, one as a young man in New York
City and the second, in which his older version struggles with alcoholism
in Philadelphia. The poet also succeeds in entering into the narrator’s life
in the form of a ghost, disrupting the distinction between past and pres-
ent, real and imagined. Early on in the novel, the ghost makes his pres-
ence known in the house she occupies in Mexico City with her young
family, “Nos gusta pensar que en esta casa hay una fantasma que nos
acompaña y observa. No lo vemos, pero creemos que apareció a las pocas
semanas de nuestra mudanza” (2011, p. 16). Despite his lack of visibility,
the specter residing among them opens and shuts doors, turns on stoves
and knocks down towers of books, and is an accepted and legitimized
aura that does not seem to provoke fear in either the narrator or her
husband. In the present tense, the young woman is also writing a novel,
140 C. RAYNOR
which further complicates matters. This writerly turn extends her dedica-
tion to letters as a reader and translator, while allowing for new modes of
place-making in the fictional world she is constructing. At times readers
are transported temporally as discussed, on other occasions the narrator
undergoes a meticulous process of occupying, carving out or even clear-
ing out spaces through her own writing. As I discuss later on, this impre-
cise shift between fictional and real spaces places the narrator’s reliability
into question as she moves between the historical, the fictive, the present
and the future.
Place as an Act of Self-Making

Many of the spatial occupations in the novel are modes of self-making,
capturing space in narrative form. One way the narrator achieves this is
by filling in the gaps of solitude in her urban life. She states, “Cuando
alguien ha vivido solo durante mucho tiempo, el único modo de constatar
que sigue existiendo es articular las actividades y las cosas en una sintaxis
compartible: esta cara, estos huesos que caminan, esta boca, esta mano que
escribe” (2011, p. 12). Here, and throughout, writing becomes a mode of
preservation of self, corroborating existence and marking a body in a space
that is otherwise empty and devoid of life. Michel de Certeau speaks to
the geographical syntax underpinned in all narrative, “Narrative structures
have the status of spatial syntaxes. By means of a whole panoply of codes,
ordered ways of proceeding and constraints, they regulate changes in space
made by stories in the form of places put in linear or interlaced series: from
here (Paris), one goes there (Montargis)” (1988, p. 115). The mode in
which the narrator writes herself into the empty apartment is a construc-
tion, as if she were taking her dismembered body parts and placing them
syntactically into the world she is writing and inhabiting. Notable also are
the body parts she includes: her face, her bones, her mouth and hands.
The two activities stressed are walking and writing; her face and mouth are
mentioned but not by virtue of speaking, they simply are. The absence of
“esta boca que habla,” denotes the nonexistence of literal voices, a silence
broken by and contrasted with the writing she is undertaking. In these
silent, empty spaces, she writes herself in.
In her work on the construction of identity in the act of writing,
Roz Ivanic argues that setting words to the page regardless of whether
one has an audience positions writers across multiple identities and dis-
courses, including some of which they may not be cognizant. She states,
It is important from the outset to recognize that the writer may not own
all, or any, of the identities which she constructs for herself in this way.
She may intentionally or unintentionally have created a multiple textual
identity which ascribes characteristics to her which she may not claim or
desire. She may also intentionally or unintentionally have concealed aspects
of her identity which she might reveal on other occasions but not here.
(1994, p. 6)
Not only does Ivanic speak to the instability of all narrative voices
despite their aim at objectivity, she also reminds the reader that identi-
ties may play out at the level of the subconscious and in multiple forms.
Los ingrávidos is a novel in which narrative reliability is constantly placed
into question, diminishing and then eroding entirely as it reaches its
final pages. In fact, the novel relies on the multiple textual identities
Ivanic discusses in order for the narrator to be able to come into con-
tact with the poet, a supernatural occurrence that seems to enter into
other dimensions, other layers of consciousness. Ivanic’s statement is also
thought-provoking when considering the many decisions the narrator
makes in writing her novel, some of which approximate her lived reality.
Indeed, the spatial syntaxes she creates through writing are at times inti-
mate and related to identity and self, on other occasions they allow for
spatial takeover or empowerment.
For example, readers learn that the narrator’s husband has left her and
journeyed to Philadelphia. In the first instance of this news, one has the
impression that this is happening in the present-day narrative. His rea-
son for leaving is due to “[…] el odio. Romper al otro, quebrarlo emo-
cionalmente una y otra vez. Dejarse romper.” (Luiselli 2011, p. 84).
A few fragments later, however, this same occurrence is written in the
mode of a creative decision, a narrative intervention. She writes, “El final
no importa. Mi marido se mudó a otra ciudad. Digamos, Filadelfia […]
Digamos que encontró a otras mujeres […]” (2011, p. 87).3 Here, the
certainty of the first fragment is destabilized, placed into the realm of
the fictive. Readers become privy to the knowledge that the husband’s
departure is something that is being crafted, a choice that has an almost
capricious air to it. Finally, the dialogue comes to a head as the narrator’s
husband reads about his own departure to Philadelphia in the pages of
his wife’s novel, asking why she sends him away. She responds, “para que
pase algo” (2011, p. 89). While at first glance this utterance may feel
arbitrary, its significance is deeply rooted. There is a tension mounting,
142 C. RAYNOR
a distancing between husband and wife that has fictional conse-

quences in her novel. The final lines come in the form of a conversation
between the two and appear to lie close to reality, a testimony to the
fact that something is brewing between them: “O tal vez mejor me voy.
¿Me estás dejando ir? / O tal vez te mueres / O ya me morí” (2011,
p. 89). It is of interest that the narrator’s husband presents the possibility
of his own death, a death that seems to be coded as based in reality, as
though something between the couple had already been extinguished.
Regardless of one’s reading, removal of the husband from the pages of
the novel is a meaningful act. Readers are left wondering if this seem-
ingly methodical clearing of space of the personal remnants of her “real
life” husband might be a necessity for fictional place-making to occur.
What room does the real have in the fictive, if the fictive has more pull
than the real?
Blurring the Distinction Between Space and Place

In order to manage her solitude, the narrator creates places out of spaces
that are liminal, or shared, distorting the lines between public and pri-
vate. The young woman exits spaces that are not her own, realms not
codified by the affect associated with place. She also allows others to
enter into her place, bedfellows from across the city who are perhaps in a
similar predicament of loneliness and lack of human contact. In this way,
she opens up what would otherwise have been a closed space, the space
of the home, into a place of transit, a realm designated for the late-night
comings and goings of other urban dwellers. She goes so far as to create
an entire ecosphere of interchangeable apartments, “No me gustaba dor-
mir sola en mi departamento. Estaba en un séptimo piso. Prefería prestar
mi casa a amistades lejanas y buscaba otros cuartos, sillones prestados,
camas compartidas para pasar la noche. Le repartí copias de mis llaves a
mucha gente. Otras personas me dieron copia de las suyas. No generosi-
dad: reciprocidad” (2011, p. 17). Not only does this final line speak to
an overwhelming need for human presence—one that trumps both pri-
vacy and arguably personal safety—it also troubles the classic distinction
between place and space. In his canonical work on human geography
Yi-Fu Tuan differentiates between space and place in the following way,
In my experience, the meaning of space often merges with that of place.

“Space” is more abstract than “place.” What begins as undifferentiated
space becomes a place as we get to know it better and endow it with value
[…] The ideas “space” and “place” require each other for definition.
From the security and stability of place we are aware of the openness,
freedom, and threat of space, and vice versa. Furthermore, if we think of
space as that which allows movement, then place is a pause; each pause
in movement makes it possible for location to be transformed into place.
(1977, p. 6)
Following Tuan’s argument, the narrator’s use of hers and others’ places
is a direct affront to the notion of place as secure, closed and stable. It
is transformed, rather, into realms that are open, free, unstable and in
motion due to the bodies that enter with varying degrees of anonym-
ity. This representation of the home is telling in that it defies traditional
space-place dichotomies, turning places into spaces and vice versa.
At the same time, the danger in this transformation is the “threat”
that Tuan discusses, the alteration of a space that was once secure into a
communal zone in which place-bound parameters and rules take on new
meaning. While it is unclear as to what exactly goes on in these rotating
apartments—the narrator gestures at sexual contact but is vague in her
wording—she portrays her apartment and those of others as a singular
place with a revolving door, challenging traditional conceptions of the
home. This treatment also unsettles the boundary between public and
private, inside and outside, hers and others, a process that has reverse
consequences for space as well. Indeed, the narrator inhabits pub-
lic spaces in ways that are also nontraditional; she imbues them with a
depth of meaning conventionally assigned to places. Elevators, subways,
park benches, public bathrooms, all become her zones of occupation,
realms in which she has significant encounters or to which she assigns
value. Just as her investigations of Owen bring new associations with the
places and spaces of the city, her rich literary life blends into her real-life
in New York City. She writes, “Los espacios públicos, como las calles y
las estaciones del metro, se iban volviendo habitables a medida que las
asignara algún valor y se les imprimiera alguna experiencia. Si yo recitaba
un pedazo de Paterson cada vez que caminaba por cierta avenida, con
el tiempo esa avenida sonaría a William Carlos Williams” (Luiselli 2011,
p. 26).4 Indeed, the opportunities for contact and collision between the
real and imagined, literary and real worlds, allow for a delicate dance that
turns traditional spatial associations on their head.
It is not only her New York City apartment which becomes dissoci-
ated from the trappings of place, but also her homes in Mexico City and
144 C. RAYNOR
Philadelphia. As mentioned above, the presence of other beings in the

home is a means of opening up the private sphere to foreign beings and
other levels of consciousness, turning it into a point of passing, a zone of
transit rather than secure and closed. In the case of her house in Mexico
City, the narrator describes the edifice falling into a ruinous state, abun-
dant in artifacts that are likened to debris, “El piso está cubierto de libros
y objetos. Deposito a la bebé en el piso, la dejo gatear entre el escombro”
(2011, p. 134). While it is unclear whether the rubble the narrator speaks
of is literal or figurative, over the course of the novel there is a breakdown
of the house that directly mirrors the collapse of narrative boundaries.
Indeed, as Owen and the narrator achieve physical and temporal prox-
imity and their formerly disparate spheres collide, the material universe
of the novel undergoes a similar conversion. Nowhere is this clearer than
in her Mexico City home, which at the end of the novel is a crumbling
structure, a ruin, a shadow. Two vignettes later, the narrator describes
her child playing in the crumbling house, “El niño mediano juega a las
escondidillas en esta casa enorme llena de hoyos” (2011, p. 136), a game
that becomes a search for her husband amidst the rubble: “Es una versión
distinta del juego. Hay que encontrar a su papá” (2011, p. 136). While
looking for her husband in the living room, the narrator finds a note
she wrote years ago while researching Gilberto Owen: “De niño, Owen
poesía ‘los seis sentidos mágicos’. Vaticinaba temblores” (2011, p. 137).
Again, it is unclear as to whether these comments are metaphorical or
based in reality, though readers have more faith in the imagined and met-
aphorical than they do in the “real” at the close of the novel.5
The Architecture of Writing: Place-Making

as Construction
Throughout Los ingrávidos, Luiselli ruminates on the construction and

collapse of material and literary worlds. Architectural metaphors abound,
speaking to the ways in which place, space and narrative are enmeshed.
Valeria Luiselli’s fascination with writing as an architectural process has
precedence, as seen in her essay, “Relingos: The Cartography of Empty
Spaces,” extracted from her collection, Sidewalks. In it, the writer exam-
ines abandoned or suspended spaces in Mexico City, locally known as
relingos, allowing Luiselli to ponder the role of writing as a means of
filling in empty spaces. She describes writing as “an inverse process of
restoration. A restorer fills the holes in a surface on which a more or less

finished image already exists; a writer starts from the fissures and the
holes. In this sense, an architect and a writer are alike. Writing: filling
in relingos” (2014c, p. 78). The removal of the narrator’s husband cre-
ates a narrative relingo, a deliberate clear-cutting that creates space for
new narratives to grow. However, his removal is not the first instance in
which the narrator separates herself from her husband through writing;
in an earlier encounter, she speaks of the excitement of working side-by-
side on differing documents in their apartment, she as a writer and he
as an architect. They would come together as strangers in the late hours
of the evening, which often ended in sex spurred by “La tabula rasa de
las páginas, el anonimato que conceden las muchas voces de la escritura”
(Luiselli 2011, p. 35). Clearly, the escape offered through the written
word allowed both partners to enter and exit each other’s lives with var-
ious guises requiring different forms of intimacy. Writing, reading and
drawing test and extend the boundaries of their marriage, allowing them
to create spaces that exist outside and beyond it.
To further the interplay between literal and literary, are the ways in
which the novels distinguishes between the construction of narrative
spaces and that of material ones. In the English version of the novel and
in a departure from the Spanish version in which the writer’s husband
works as a writer, the role of the narrator’s husband as an architect allows
him to craft plans for physical spaces to which she assigns a creative value
superior to that of her figurative spaces. While watching him draw she
observes, “He constructs spaces and, as they appear on the sheet, names
them: bathroom, spiral staircase, terrace, attic […] I can’t make spaces
from nothing. I can’t invent. I only manage to emulate ghosts, write the
way they used to speak, not make noise, emulate our phantasmagoria”
(2014a, p. 11). Although the writer’s husband undergoes a similar pro-
cess of world-making, assigning signifiers to the signified artifacts of his
architectural blueprints, the narrator interprets his as an inventive pro-
cess, one that differs from the making of her lettered worlds. She sees
her hunt for Owen as pure mimicry and imitation, a chase in words and
phantoms. This is a chase that she sees as fragmented, devoid of sub-
stance and existing solely in the shadowed outlines of a constructed his-
tory. While writing her novel and contemplating the ghost of Owen that
keeps her company in the process, she comments, “En todas las novelas
falta algo o alguien. En esa novela no hay nadie. Nadie salvo un fantasma
146 C. RAYNOR
que a veces veía en el metro” (2011, p. 73). The brevity of this frag-
ment catches the reader’s attention; it is a mere three lines, and could
be interpreted as a type of aside, a footnote, words in passing. It is also a
message laden with apathy spurred by the futility the young woman feels
while writing: the only company she keeps is the illusory ghost. The nar-
rator draws steadily upon comparisons with the physical world in order
to explain the underpinnings of writing, remembering and crafting fic-
tion, despite the fact that she does not consider the process of writing to
have the real-world legitimacy or the inventiveness of architectural plans
designated for real-life production.
Not only does the narrator often see the writing of her novel as illu-
sory and without substance, she describes her loneliest days in New York
City as a type of scaffolding, “Lo único que perdura de aquel período
son los ecos de algunas conversaciones, un puñado de ideas recurrentes,
poemas que me gustaban y releía una y otra vez hasta aprenderlos de
memoria. Todo lo demás es elaboración posterior. Mis recuerdos de esa
vida no podrían tener mayor contenido. Son andamiajes, estructuras,
casas vacías” (2011, p. 14). These architectural comparisons aid readers
in grasping the materially barren life of that particular period, both in
terms of the contact she had with others and in the lack of physical items
surrounding her, “En aquel departamento había sólo cinco muebles:
cama, mesa-comedor, librero, escritorio y silla” (2011, p. 13). All that
remained of her life then was in the form of words: echoes of conversa-
tions, ideas and poems. Although the narrator comments on these let-
tered vestiges as hollow and lacking the consistency of filled-out memory
or the material strength of a home ripe with many artifacts, her remark
returns readers to the power of the textual in the novel. In the face of
stark rooms and restless lives, words, experiences and people carry on.
Expatriation and Community Building

in Liminal and Shared Spaces
Finally, I would like to comment briefly on how the novel treats the con-
cept of community and solidarity between two expatriated subjects who
collide in increasing intensity across space and time. In addition to giv-
ing value to the noncanonical, Los ingrávidos deals with another recur-
ring theme in contemporary Latin America, that of writing outside the
boundaries of homeland. One need only turn to the canon for a mul-
titude of examples of writers who both worked on themes extending
beyond their national experience and also resided significant periods of

time abroad. To enumerate but a handful of examples one could cite
twentieth century authors Jorge Luis Borges, Pablo Neruda and Julio
Cortázar, as well as more recent writers including the aforementioned
Roberto Bolaño or Patricio Pron. In many ways, Valeria Luiselli is an
author whose life and body of work has been defined by travel, expa-
triatism and movement. Born in Mexico City and residing in New York
City, Luiselli has lived for significant periods of time in Costa Rica, South
Korea, South Africa, India, Spain and France. Her body of work, both
literary and in essay form, frequently deals with issues of migration, travel
and the loss associated with displacement. Writer, literary critic and emi-
grant Salman Rushdie speaks to his fixation on loss and recuperating
memory during the writing of his important novel, Midnight’s Children,
“It may be that writers in my position, exiles or emigrants or expatriates,
are haunted by some sense of loss, some urge to reclaim, to look back,
even at the risk of being mutated into pillars of salt […] What I was actu-
ally doing was a novel of memory and about memory” (1992, p. 10).
While Los ingrávidos is not a piece centered on nostalgia for nation, it is
a work about memory and the feelings that separation from homeland
evoke, including melancholy, solitude and displacement.
In addition to Los ingrávidos (2011) and La historia de mis dientes
(2014b), Luiselli has published two nonfictional collections of essays,
the above-mentioned Papeles Falsos (2010), published in English as
Sidewalks (2013), as well as Los niños perdidos: un ensayo en cuarenta pre-
guntas (2016). This final piece is a compilation of interviews with Latin
American children facing deportation. The collection serves to human-
ize these young people, while shedding light upon the contradiction
between the image of the United States as a haven for immigrants and
the racism and terror that they face. In her work, Luiselli plays particular
attention to the ways in which physical displacement does not signify a
closure in the realm of affect; on the contrary, she examines how immi-
grants often live in multiple mnemonic spaces as they grapple with feel-
ings of abandonment, separation, isolation or regret. In Los ingrávidos,
the narrator and Owen have complex sentiments around their role as
expatriates, making the peculiar companionship that they establish espe-
cially noteworthy. Indeed, this meeting of ghost poet and modern-day
writer offers some unexpected commonalities. Both the narrator and
Gilberto Owen are from Mexico City but take up residence in New York
and Philadelphia, colliding in these two US metropolises nearly a century
148 C. RAYNOR
apart. Despite his status as a poet, Owen is likewise an aspiring novel-

ist. When speaking of his future work, he writes, “Sé que quiero escribir
una novela que sucede en una casona en la ciudad de México y en el
Nueva York de mi juventud. Todos los personajes están muertos, o afan-
tasmados, pero no lo saben. Me contó Salvador Novo que hay un joven
escritor en México que está haciendo algo parecido” (Luiselli 2011,
p. 136). Despite appearances, Owen seems to be referring to the narra-
tor—or even to Luiselli herself—rather than to one of his contemporar-
ies, defying chronological logic. Indeed, his remark seems to reach out
across the void of space and time, gesturing to the very novel the narra-
tor is writing. Los ingrávidos is abundant with such liminal spaces, zones
of contact offered in fictive and real form. As the novel progresses and
the distinction between fact and fiction becomes obscured, opportunities
are afforded for narrative collisions between Owen and Luiselli’s narrator.
For example, Owen observes a woman in a red coat with sad eyes who
readers take to be the narrator (2011, p. 93); and a similarly described
woman is later seen passing by carrying a chair as Owen converses with
Spanish poet Federico García Lorca (2011, p. 117). This, the reader
assumes, is the narrator returning the chair she took from her office
(2011, p. 81). However, the chronological impossibility of this interac-
tion amuses and confounds the reader. Similarly, we see the removal of a
plant on the terrace of the Owen’s apartment building that the narrator
finds and steals (2011, pp. 32–33); as well as parallel encounters with
a girl named Dolores in Morningside (2011, p. 105). Although these
meetings are never direct, they establish a type of camaraderie and com-
munity between the two wandering expatriate Mexican writers. There is
the sense that the narrator is writing toward or at Owen, drawing him in
and creating spaces for potential encounters. The contact the two have is
not one-sided; Owen observes the narrator as she encounters vestiges of
him. While it could be argued that Owen is not cognizant of whom he is
observing whereas the narrator is on an obvious hunt, the repeated pres-
ence of the woman garbed in the red coat underscores her importance.
Though Owen may not know exactly who he is observing, the happen-
stance of their meetings establishes a type of connection. This connec-
tion persists throughout the novel, and readers watch as the narrator
and Owen begin to experience the world in tandem. Given the general
sense of solitude that hangs heavy in the novel, the contact established
between Owen and the narrator, however unusual and short-lived, serves
a greater purpose.
Conclusion
Luiselli’s debut novel is indeed an extended reflection on space. The
spaces of the work are material and figurative, real and imagined, literal
and literary. Above all, they are defined by an augmented plasticity that
invites encounters between past and present, between Owen and the nar-
rator, in ways that play out in symphonic form. As the novel progresses,
place-making has real consequences for the young woman. She creates
places through narration, through a dedication to literary worlds that
bleed into real life, and by making places out of nontraditional, shared
and public domains. In doing so the narrator combats the solitude of
the city, finding points of human contact that seem to know no bounds.
She also insists upon the importance of Owen as a literary and ghostly
companion, challenging canonical and world literary standards around
the lack of value of the marginal, the peripheral, and the liminal. It is
within the liminal space that her connection to Owen thrives, in the
non-regulated gray areas of an increasingly flexible narrative world. In
the final pages of Los ingrávidos, there seems to be no material or liter-
ary boundaries. The collapse of the novel (and the novel within a novel)
plays out in material ways, as seen poignantly in the crumbling house in
Mexico City that lies in shambles filled with holes, at least according to
our increasingly unreliable narrator. However, the value of narrative reli-
ability itself is scrutinized in Los ingrávidos. As readers learn to inhabit
the novel within the novel and release themselves from the confines of
reliability, they abandon their fixation on the untrustworthy narrator and
enter new worlds uninhibited by strict dichotomies of place and space. It
is within the marginal, that which lies between and beyond, that strange
and delightful encounters are made possible.
As readers reach the end, literary figures begin to enter into the nar-
rator’s real-world interaction fluidly, without consequence. Federico
Lorca, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Emily Dickinson and
Gilberto Owen all scatter the final pages as though they were ordi-
nary protagonists, no longer vanquished to the confines of the strictly
literary, existing in plain sight (2011, pp. 140–145). One has the sense
that the narrator is living fully in all of her multiple narrative identi-
ties, that of reader, translator, writer, mother and wife. As Los ingráv-
idos reaches a close, each vignette becomes ever shorter, just three to
four lines in length, giving readers the sense that the narrative is racing
to the finish line. There is a sense of urgency at the close, as the young
150 C. RAYNOR
boy plays hide-and-go-seek, the final line of the work an exclamation:

“¡Encontrado!” (2011, p. 146). At once, the reader is lifted out of the
collapsing narrative, drawn back to reality not by the narrator but by the
same young boy who began the novel.
Notes
1. Valeria Luiselli originally published this novel in 2011 under the title, Los
ingrávidos. In 2014, the work was translated into English by Christina
MacSweeney under the title, Faces in the Crowd. It should be noted that
some substantive differences in the content between the original Spanish
and the English translation exist, some of which are addressed in this
chapter.
2. Gilberto Owen Estrada was born in Rosario, Sinaloa, Mexico in 1904
and died in Philadelphia in 1952. He was a Mexican poet and diplomat
whose body of poetic work was substantial. Luiselli’s interest in the poet is
long-standing. She published a short piece on the author in a Mexico City
based literary magazine, Letras Libres in 2009, entitled “Gilberto Owen,
Narrador.”
3. In the English publication of Los ingrávidos (Faces in the Crowd, 2014),
this fragment is followed by “Or maybe he just got fed up, locked himself
in an apartment in Philadelphia, and allowed himself to slowly die” (81).
4. Paterson is an epic poem by American poet William Carlos Williams. The
poem was published between 1946 and 1958, and comprises a total of five
volumes.
5. Further diminishing the narrator’s reliability, the young boy does not seem
to be aware of the breakdown of the house around him. When the nar-
rator suggests they keep out of the kitchen in case the house begins to
shake again, the boy asks “¿Cómo que si vuele a temblar?” (141). In the
English publication (Faces in the Crowd), when the narrator suggests that
the ghost could help them glue the house back together after the earth-
quake, the boy brings her back into his reality, stating “Earthquakes don’t
exist, Mama” (138).
Bibliography
Cardoso Nelky, Regina. 2014. “Fantasmas y Sosias en Los Ingrávidos, de Valeria
Luiselli.” Romance Notes 54: 77–84.
Certeau, Michel de. 1988. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of
California Press.
Ivanic, Roz. 1994. “I Is for Interpersonal: Discoursal Construction of Writer
Identities and the Teaching of Writing.” Linguistics and Education 6, no. 1:
3–15.
Luiselli, Valeria. 2009. “Gilberto Owen, Narrador.” Letras Libres 11, no. 121:
58–59.
———. 2010. Papeles falsos. Mexico: Sexto Piso.
———. 2011. Los ingrávidos. Mexico: Sexto Piso.
———. 2014a. Faces in the Crowd. Translated by Christina MacSweeney.
Minneapolis: Coffee House Press.
———. 2014b. La historia de mis dientes. Mexico: Sexto Piso.
———. 2014c. Sidewalks. Translated by Christina MacSweeney. Minneapolis:
Coffee House Press.
———. 2016. Los niños perdidos: un ensayo en cuarenta preguntas. México: Sexto
Piso.
Rushdie, Salman. 1992. Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981–1991.
London: Penguin.
Tuan, Yi-Fu. 1977. Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press.
CHAPTER 8
Dislocated Subjects in the Global City:

Santiago Gamboa’s Hotel Pekín
Camilo A. Malagón
Santiago Gamboa’s Hotel Pekín is a novel whose protagonist, Frank

Michalski, “dislocates” his life to enter the global order; Frank chooses
to give up his original name, Francisco Munévar, his passport and his
nationality at the same time that he becomes an important employee in
a company that helps top executives of corporations in emerging econ-
omies adopt a Western way of life. In the novel, Frank must travel to
Beijing to give his seminar on Western business practices, but there
he meets a few characters who will make him question his way of life.
Cornelius Bordewich is a reporter who spends his life traveling through
the world searching for intimate stories to tell. Li Qiang is a Chinese
executive who has recently moved to Beijing to head one of the top
telecommunication companies in China and takes part in one of Frank
Michalski’s seminars. Ming Cheng is a bank executive at the Bank for the
Development of Asia, the institution that sponsors Frank’s trip to China;
she represents a modern China that wants to continue developing rapidly
and find a place among the powerful nations of the world. Like Frank, all
C. A. Malagón (*) 
Department of Int’l Languages and Literatures, Department of English,
Saint Catherine University, Saint Paul, MN, USA

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-92438-0_8
154 C. A. MALAGÓN
of these characters are also dislocated in their own way, and through his
relationship with them, Frank changes his ideas about his work and life
while the novel reflects upon dislocation in the global world.
Novels and other cultural artifacts from the last two decades in Latin
America are reflecting upon globalization and Hotel Pekín is no excep-
tion.1 The Beijing described in most of Gamboa’s novel is a Beijing of non-
places. Non-places are spaces of transit, circulation and consumption where
identity, history and representation cannot be deposited (Augé 2008).2
Michalski moves mostly through these new spaces favored by globaliza-
tion: hotels, their restaurants and bars, high-rise corporate offices, airplanes
and airports. All the non-places in this new Beijing reinforce its status as
global city, a term coined by sociologist Saskia Sassen (2001) to describe
the function that some cities serve in the global capitalist economy of the
twenty-first century. Global cities serve as nodal points for transnational net-
works of capital, amassing managerial control of global operation—and in
consequence, amassing capital as well—and becoming a new world urban
reality. Cities like New York, Tokyo and London are considered global cities
in Sassen’s configuration (2001), and arguably, Beijing is also a global city
in Hotel Pekín. Frank Michalski’s work is directly related to the global city
operations of Beijing as he will be there teaching his seminar for entrepre-
neurs and top executives of corporations.
My discussion here deals with dislocation: the conflation of subjectiv-
ity and space in an irreversible movement that causes a feeling of unheim-
lich [uncanny] (Freud 1955), of disarray, of lack of place.3 I deal here
with subjects that have lost their place in the world, that have exchanged
the immobility of home for the mobility of the world. In this chapter, I
study the ideas of mobility, and mobile subjects; subjects in movement,
subjects that through their movement in space have come to question
their home, their nation, and their sense of location within the nation in
the novel Hotel Pekín.
I have chosen to describe these subjects with the category dislocated
subjects because it ties their questioning of their own national affiliations
with spatiality. I have come to this term particularly through the cate-
gories of “vagabond” and “tourist” put forward by Zygmunt Bauman
(1925–2017) in a chapter of his book Globalization: The Human
Consequences ([1998] 2005). Bauman’s book analyzes the underbelly
of globalization: the negative consequences of the continuous road to
turn the world into one global capitalist economy. Bauman proposes that
the contemporary world is a postmodern reality where nation-states are
8 DISLOCATED SUBJECTS IN THE GLOBAL CITY: SANTIAGO … 155
losing the power to define the identity of their subjects and global capi-
tal has erased, or at the very least greatly questioned, nation-state auton-
omy as well as created a hyper-consumerist society which he calls “liquid
modernity.” This new global reality is one of nomadic subjects, moving
through space for a variety of reasons, and no longer completely bound
by ideological, economic or other ties to their nation-state.
Bauman’s ideas were not necessarily sui generis in the 1990s. After the
fall of the Berlin Wall, several social scientists foresaw similar fates for the
power of the nation-state (Appadurai 1996; Habermas 2001; Jauregui
Bereciartu 2004; Guéhenno 1995). The first decade of the twenty-first
century has in many ways not lived up to the promise of this deterritori-
alization theorized by many, when in a post-9/11 world, the nation-state
continues to have relevance and inspire war and patriotic sentiments (Held
and McGrew 2007). In the case of Latin America, the return of left-wing
governments and social programs in the region further complicate the pic-
ture of unfettered, unquestioned globality (Levitsky and Roberts 2011).
Nevertheless, within this picture, mobility continues to increase in differ-
ent ways: Cities in the region continue to grow with mobility from rural to
urban areas, Latin Americans continue to leave their countries for greener
grasses elsewhere due to insecurity and precarious economic and living
conditions; global connectedness, the result of technological advances and
political will, continues to inspire people to move in the contemporary
global landscape. Even if the larger premises of Bauman (1996) cannot
completely be accounted for in the twenty-first century, some of his meta-
phors can still help us understand some types of contemporary mobility—
including the variety of terms he uses for mobile subjects or nomads.4
Yet, the term “nomad” was problematic for Bauman. He argues that
“the fashionable term ‘nomads,’ applied indiscriminately to all contempo-
raries of the postmodern era, is grossly misleading, as it glosses over the
profound differences which separate two types of experience and render
all similarity between them formal and superficial” (1996, p. 87). Bauman
creates two categories to understand these two experiences, namely, “tour-
ists” and “vagabonds.” The tourists are the subjects that can move about
the world freely, the global businessmen and women, the global culture
managers or global academics for whom borders have been dismantled, as
they have also been for the world’s commodities, capital and finance mar-
kets. The vagabonds are the opposite of the tourists within this paradigm;
they are the dispossessed, the displaced, the subjects dedicated to serve the
world of the tourists (Bauman 1996, p. 92).5
156 C. A. MALAGÓN
Bauman explains that in the contemporary globalized consumer soci-

ety, there are two types of inhabitants. On one side the tourists that
circulate freely through spaces, consuming and enjoying the yields of
a fruitful modernity. On the other side, the vagabonds: the workers of
the service industry, the displaced, that migratory wave of peoples that
moves through space without a voice. Both of these subjects are travel-
ers, as Bauman explains, “the tourists move because they find the world
within their (global) reach irresistibly attractive—the vagabonds move
because they find the world within their (local) reach unbearably inhos-
pitable. The tourists travel because they want to; the vagabonds because
they have no other bearable choice” (1996, pp. 92–93, emphases in orig-
inal). One of Bauman’s oversights with these two categories is that they
are defined in terms of class. Tourists would be the term that refers to
the managerial and academic elites whose cultural and financial capital
gives them the opportunity to move effortlessly and without resistance
through the world. Vagabonds are the opposite, the ones left out of the
equation by late capitalism, those who have neither financial nor social
power, and whose mobility is one directly affected by capital in a nega-
tive manner: dispossessed, displaced, kicked out of their space. It is hard
not to see the relevance of class in these categories. And in fact, Bauman,
as a sociologist connected to Marxist interpretations of society and who
heavily critiques late capitalism, does subtly place class and economic
preoccupations onto these categories. So, why might one argue against
reading these concepts uniquely through the lens of class? The reason
is that these categories cannot be reduced entirely to class distinctions.
If one reduces them to class, one loses the important spatial and mobile
component inherent in the categorizations and the possibility of under-
standing certain social complexities that may apply to their use. Obvious
recent examples of vagabonds may include the myriad refugees escaping
war zones moving northward and westward in both the Middle East and
in Central America. Even though the economic component has a place in
these discussions, the complexities of these situations cannot be reduced
to mere economic analyses, and thus, Bauman’s categories offer a differ-
ent kind of understanding for these mobilities.
It is important to note, that while Bauman believes these categories
apply to real subjects, in my use of them, they are better understood as
limits within the range of experiences that represented subjects can have.
The characters in the novels that I study oscillate between the world of
the tourists and that of the vagabonds, and no one category can describe
their heterogeneous experiences. In Hotel Pekín, I will not be looking

only at spaces, but also at the mobility of the subjects represented. My
term “dislocated subject” comes from a synthesis of the terms “tourist”
and “vagabond.” This operation also allows me to undo the class pre-
occupations that Bauman instills into his original categories, but keep
the important spatial component that elucidates my readings. Dislocated
subjects exhibit characteristics of both the tourist and the vagabond, they
move through space both by a combination of necessity and choice, and
they have a complex relationship with space that cannot be reduced to
either of these categories. Dislocated subjects are characters that expe-
rience mobility, and the different contexts that pertain to this mobility
affect their relationship with space. Dislocated subjects are mobile sub-
jects, but they are not nomads, nor exiles, nor tourists. How does this
term relate to all these categories?
From the realm of philosophy, other theorists, most notably Deleuze
and Guattari, have come up with different interpretations of the cate-
gory of “nomad,” related to Bauman’s, but without the work of undo-
ing the nomad into further categories. Deleuze and Guattari describe
the nomad as a person who traverses space continuously, “the life of the
nomad is the intermezzo. Even the elements of his dwelling are con-
ceived in terms of the trajectory that is forever mobilizing them” (2009,
p. 380). The nomad is in a space in-between, but not as an actual space,
it is a temporary abode, a dwelling in movement, a dwelling that is only
an excuse for his continuous movement: “the nomad can be called the
Deterritorialized par excellence…because there is no reterritorializa-
tion afterward” (2009, p. 381, emphasis in original). The nomad does
not live in a territory and this is the difference between this category
of nomad and the category of dislocated subject that I have enunci-
ated. Dislocated subjects have a tumultuous relationship to space, they
are in space, but not in place. They do not fit nicely into political cate-
gories of space—such as the nation-state—but they are not completely
deterritorialized.
In the work of Caren Kaplan, she describes the relationship between
exiles and tourists, and how these two characters embody different ways
of thinking about modernity. She explains that exiles and tourists have
traditionally worked as oppositions; exiles move by necessity, while tour-
ists move by choice—and these appreciations are similar to those of
Bauman for the terms vagabonds and tourists. Yet, she believes that this
atemporal dichotomy does not explain the historical contexts of each of
158 C. A. MALAGÓN
the terms, and how this can help readers better understand the critical
discourses that have defined them. Exiles, according to Kaplan, corre-
spond to Euro-American expatriates in the 1920s and 1930s that moved
with some freedom through national borders, engaged in intellectual and
artistic writing and who maintained a complicated and, at times, antag-
onistic relationship with their homelands. However, these writers were
mostly privileged white men, of middle-class origins, who reproduced
a colonial logic of exoticism of the other, and did not effectively see
their lives as related to other mobile subjects: immigrants and refugees
(Kaplan 1996, pp. 27–57). Edward Said (2002) has also theorized the
figure of the exile, but for him, it does not correspond as much to a spe-
cific set of expatriates or émigrés from the 1920s and 1930s, but rather
to a type of traveler that no longer has a home, that was forced out of a
home, and, he believes the term should include the large masses of ref-
ugees displaced globally. For Said, the term does not have a historical
specificity necessarily; for Kaplan it does.
Moreover, Kaplan sees exiles as the precursors to tourists. The term
tourist “arises out of the economic disasters of other countries that
make them ‘affordable’ or subject to ‘development,’ trading upon long-
established traditions of cultural hegemony, and, in turn, participating in
new versions of hegemonic relations” (1996, p. 63). While I think that this
definition of tourist also engages in a Eurocentric formulation (What about
tourists that make the opposite move: from countries or places considered
“affordable” or “subject to development” to Disney World?), it presents a
continuity between exiles and tourists. Exiles create modernity by moving
freely around the world documenting it, with their gaze of imperialist nos-
talgia (Kaplan 1996, p. 34), and tourists create postmodernity by consum-
ing commodities while, also, moving freely around the world.
The term dislocated subjects dialogues with the work of all of these
critics but it is particularly interested in the relationship that subjects
have with spaces, as it relates to their relative mobility, and how this
mobility changes through time. In the case of Hotel Pekín, the protag-
onist deals with situations that change his mobility and cause disloca-
tion, but this dislocation is not solid and immovable, it is rather fluid and
changes with his fluid perceptions of space itself. This dislocation does
not pertain to a mobility operated only by necessity (exile-vagabond), or
only by choice (tourist), but rather to the complex relationship between
the need to move in space, through borders and cultures, and how
exactly they do it and why. It is only through the instance of reading and
understanding this protagonist, and the other characters of the novel,
that we can understand how different characters embody this dislocation,
and what it means to them—and more importantly, what it means to us
and what it can tell us about narrative and culture.
Bauman’s work has consistently deployed metaphorical categories
such as these two to make sense of reality, and it is part of his theoretical
paradigm to believe in the blurring of disciplinary boundaries to explore
the connections that interdisciplinary work may bring upon critical anal-
ysis (Jacobsen and Marshman 2006). This is, partly, the reason that they
can be easily borrowed and used in the task of the hermeneutical study
of texts. While I am providing, perhaps, a tout court justification of the
epistemological operation that I am suggesting grounded in Bauman’s
own theoretical processes, I do think that Bauman’s reformulated cat-
egories as the category dislocated subjects helps explain certain rep-
resentations, connected to imaginaries of globality, in cultural artifacts.
Dislocated subjects are both tourists and vagabonds, their mobility can-
not be understood either as effortless travel or forced displacement: it is
both, and this ambiguity is one of the constitutive factors of the disloca-
tion itself. Yet, to understand how these dislocated subjects are deployed
in texts, and what their political relevance is, one must ground these
representations in the relevant contextual framework of the novel, but
also in how they are being deployed within a larger context of meaning,
intra- inter- and para-textually.
The novel Hotel Pekín, by the Colombian author Santiago Gamboa
is not sui generis: the story of a Western traveler going East to find him-
self spiritually, finding a renewed sense of self in this encounter. In this
case, the story is that of Frank Michalski, the protagonist, who travels
to Beijing to embark on a new professional task. Michalski is one of the
top “international trainers” for a company called Enhancing the Future,
a center for economic studies that specializes in teaching the manage-
rial elite of emerging economies the unspoken rules of business and
consumption. In this seminar, he will be teaching them techniques of
conspicuous consuming behavior that should accord with Western ste-
reotypes of business: what suits and shoes to wear, how many to even
own, how to do effective wine and food pairings according to loca-
tion, weather and circumstance and a number of other seemingly vac-
uous enterprises that should enhance the manner in which these top
160 C. A. MALAGÓN
executives conduct business with the Western world. These seminars

of “elegant” conspicuous consumption are supposed to teach the pre-
sumed “premodern,” “precapitalist” or “uncultured” Chinese business-
men how to engage in a capitalist way of life that agrees with what is
expected of Western economic elites. As Frank explains, the idea of the
seminars stems, à la trickle-down economics, from the belief that if these
elites learn all of these rules of consumption, the upper middle classes,
and the ascending middle classes will follow suit, which will stimulate
growth in the economy and will modernize China, helping the country
become a global power: As Michalski explains, the economic elite must
be a “guía global” in this process, and must learn and follow these rules
to be successful (Gamboa 2008, p. 66). The novel follows the “capital-
ist guide” Frank, and some of the earlier-mentioned acquaintances he
meets: Cornelius Bordewich, Li Qiang and Ming Cheng. During the
trip to Beijing, the relationship that he establishes with these characters
makes Frank question his work as a seminar teacher for Enhancing the
Future, and his work as a harbinger and expediter of capitalist behavior
and tendencies.
The novel presents two tensions as the narrative foci. First, it repre-
sents China, through Michalski’s poor and simplistic understanding of
the country, as a space of purity, spirituality, religion, extreme national-
ism and bound by tradition: untouched by Western ideas of capital and
enterprise. Michalski’s view of China is orientalist, grounded in tradi-
tional Western thought about Middle East and Far East nations (Said
2004). Furthermore, the novel represents the tension between the global
and the national. With the global represented by Michalski, who comes
to impose capitalist views that he sees as universal so that China can con-
tinue its process of modernization and market integration in globaliza-
tion, and the national represented by Li Qiang, Bordewich and others
who remain suspicious and unconvinced by the apparent benefits of
globality.
These two foci are seen through the difficult tensions between some
of the characters in the novel. One of them is between Michalski, the
Western “professor” who has come to China to teach the Chinese
how to conduct business with the West and Qiang, the ascetic Chinese
executive whose traditional and nationalistic worldview clashes with
Michalski’s views of China and his easy-sailing expectations for the sem-
inar. Frank calls Li Qiang a “reticent agent” in his seminar, a category
that his very own Enhancing the Future manual warns against and has
tools to help deal with, namely a student who usually seems uninter-
ested or resistant to the ideas explained in the seminar. Qiang sees the
etiquette and conspicuous consumption practices espoused by Michalski
as either superfluous or obvious.
Moreover, there is also a tension between Michalski and Bordewich,
the former trying to homogenize cultural and economic difference
through his seminars and the latter looking for originality everywhere
he travels. In a conversation with Michalski on a plane to China where
they originally meet, Bordewich explains that he is in search of an origi-
nal story in the country, an important imminent announcement from the
Central Committee, or the upper echelons of the Chinese government.
Yet, as the reporter explains, he will not be covering the main story, as
for him, real stories are near the epicenter of an event, but not quite in
the center. He will rather walk about different places in Beijing looking
for an untold, original thing to write about. Bordewich tells Michalski in
this first conversation between them that he does not quite believe in his
work, and that he thinks he will find it very hard to succeed—a comment
that, at the end, turns out to be true, as Michalski, due to his interac-
tions with Bordewich and Qiang, starts questioning his work.
Hotel Pekín continues a decade or so of interest in China by Santiago
Gamboa. The writer worked as a correspondent in the country for inter-
national newspapers, and has also written Octubre en Pekín [October
in Beijing] (2001), a literary travel narrative—sponsored by Grijalbo
Mondadori as part of their series titled “Año 0” (EFE 2001); and the
novel Los impostores [The Impostors] (2002a), also set in Beijing, about
three intellectuals, a German philologist, a Sino-Peruvian literature
professor who lives in Austin, TX, and a Colombian journalist living in
France who all meet in Beijing and get involved in an international con-
spiracy looking for an ancient lost Chinese manuscript. These works by
Gamboa, along with other texts by César Aira, Ariel Magnus and other
contemporary authors, are part of a new literary current that focuses on
transpacific imaginaries and transpacific connections between China and
Latin America (Hoyos 2013). These texts are all part of a global phase
in the work of Gamboa, who at the beginning of his career focused on
novels and stories dealing directly with Colombian reality in the 1990s
(See, e.g. Páginas de vuelta [Pages of a Return] (1995) and Perder es
cuestión de método [Losing is a question of method] (1997)), turning to
representations of globalization in many novels in the 2000s and the
2010s.6 In recent years, Gamboa has turned his attention again to novels
162 C. A. MALAGÓN
dealing with characters who have returned to Colombia after spend-

ing time abroad (Una casa en Bogotá [A House in Bogotá] (2014) and
Volver al oscuro valle [Return to the Dark Valley] (2016)). These turns
in Gamboa’s work seem to follow his own biography, as he lived in
Colombia but moved abroad, first to Paris to pursue doctoral studies in
Latin American literature but dropping out to work as a reporter and
diplomat in many places in the world, including India, China and other
countries in the Middle and Far East, and Europe. In the second decade
of the twenty-first century, he returned to Colombia with his family.
Gamboa’s protagonist Frank Michalski shares some similarities with
the author, as a Colombian national with a cosmopolitan perspective:
Gamboa, like Michalski, has spent many years living and traveling all
over the world. Yet, all the novel’s characters have had displacements that
mark their worldview and their approach to life. Frank as the former Latin
American immigrant turned global executive, Bordewich as the wander-
lust reporter, forever finding himself fascinated by stories anywhere in
the world, Li Qiang, who migrated locally, moving from a small village
to become one of the presidents of the largest telecommunications com-
pany in China, and Ming Cheng as the lonely bank executive, who was
separated from her ex-husband and her son as a result of the demands
of her job in Beijing—in this last case, she feels displaced not due to her
own mobility but that of her ex-husband and son who have moved to
Hong Kong. They all seemed to have gained and lost something in that
process of displacements, and that’s why they are dislocated subjects. This
is where the novel differs from similar narratives that focus on a male
Western character traveling East to impart knowledge. Gamboa’s narra-
tive presents itself as the story of the tension between the global and the
local—Frank as the globalizing agent, Qiang as the reticent student who
feels that there is loss in the process of ascribing to Michalski’s moder-
nity—and in the end, it becomes a complex story of dislocation. All the
mobilities here are questioned, and this, in turn, dissolves the opposition
between global and local, or at the very least, counteracts it.
Bordewich is going to Beijing hoping to write a story about the
changes that are about to come in the Central Committee—the high-
est authority in the Chinese government—and the possible repercus-
sions stemming from the change. However, Bordewich believes that the
story he wants to tell will be close to the source, but not at the source
itself. In other words, he is looking for a story about China—but not
necessarily about the changes in the Central Committee, or the deep

economic changes that are happening in the country, as he explains to
Frank. Bordewich says,
A lo largo de mi vida, en mis múltiples viajes y experiencias por el mundo,

he ido elaborando una teoría sobre los asuntos humanos. Es cierto que los
periodistas nos ocupamos de la actualidad, pero yo he notado que las his-
torias ejemplares que a mí me interesan, los dramas que resultan ser más
representativos de la condición humana, ocurren en los lugares donde los
ojos del mundo están puestos, pero no en el epicentro. (Gamboa 2008,
pp. 15–16)
Bordewich’s stay in Beijing is filled with walks around the city follow-
ing the locals to where they spend their leisure time, looking at cemeter-
ies, exploring the underworld of a controversial religious group that is
against the communist government and meeting and talking to a woman
who is a singer at a shady bar/brothel and learning her story. These are
the little dramas that he pursues. Bordewich, thus, configures his work
within a postmodernist outlook of the world. Truth, with a capital T,
is transient, relative or non-existent; we do not have History, just sto-
ries to tell—and these are the stories he is looking for. This theory of
Bordewich’s becomes important at the end of the novel—after hav-
ing looked and found possible stories to tell, in the last few lines of the
novel, Bordewich tells Michalski that he might end up telling Michalski’s
own story. Perhaps the novel Hotel Pekín is that very story (as mentioned
earlier, Gamboa himself worked in Beijing as a journalist). Bordewich
and Michalski have a series of conversations about their work in China,
capitalism and globalization. They meet in the hotel’s bar every night to
talk about their days and their work. Bordewich believes that “real glo-
balization” is impossible because the world is too diverse, and Michalski
believes that there are some universal ideas that can be salvaged from a
world of multiplicities—among them, of course, capitalism, the expan-
sion of which is his main goal.
As part of his Beijing wanderings trying to find a story to tell for his
newspaper, Bordewich meets Mi-Mi, a singer and waitress at a Karaoke
parlor. She brings drinks and sings in private rooms to visitors, but she
is not an escort or prostitute, as she makes clear to Bordewich: “clientes
no pueden tocarnos” (Gamboa 2008, p. 132). After Bordewich touches
her by mistake, she storms off, and the next time she sees Bordewich on
164 C. A. MALAGÓN
a different night, she insists, “hoy usted no toca el hombro, hoy bien”
(2008, p. 172). Mi-Mi’s father was Chinese but grew up in Moscow
playing classical piano. After Mao took control of the country, Mi-Mi’s
father, like many sympathizers of the revolution, came back triumphantly
in the 1950s to take part in the new Communist project in the coun-
try, and eventually accepted a teaching position in a new conservatory in
Beijing. In the 1960s, during the Cultural Revolution, when the party
became more nationalistic, he was imprisoned and sent to Mongolia.
He was later released and came back to Beijing to teach but was never
able to play again, his hands destroyed during his imprisonment. He died
years later, and left his instruments to his daughter, hoping she could
study and play as he never could again. With no money, she could not
study, and worked at the Karaoke joint to survive. Mi-Mi has a Chinese
boyfriend, also from Beijing. However, he lives in Singapore, and they
only know each other through their online conversations: They have
never met in real life.
Mi-Mi’s personal life is also one of a dislocated subject, in a way: from
the story of her father who grew up as a Chinese émigré in Moscow,
his return and later rejection, and her lonely life with her only intimate
connection with her boyfriend in Singapore through a computer. But
with her story, there is also a linguistic dislocation revealed in the novel:
Her strange use of language (“Clientes no pueden tocarnos” without
the appropriate definite article “los”) perhaps points to a lack of formal
education. Here, we can attribute a linguistic dislocation to the novel
itself: Gamboa’s choice for Mi-Mi’s grammatical stumbling is curious,
when it is clear that these characters are most likely not speaking Spanish
in reality, but probably English or some other language. Why does
Gamboa choose this register for Mi-Mi? It is part of the way that the
novel constructs these Asian characters in an orientalist way. With Mi-Mi,
it is her linguistic register, with Li Qiang, his nationalistic reticence and
close-mindedness to the work of Michalski.
The character Cornelius F. Bordewich appears as Fergus Bordewich
in another text by Santiago Gamboa, the short story “Muy cerca del mar
te escribo,” part of the collection of Colombian short stories Cuentos
caníbales [Cannibal Stories] that came out in 2002, featuring young, up
and coming or moderately established fiction writers, including Santiago
Gamboa, Antonio Ungar, Juan Gabriel Vásquez, Mario Mendoza,
Diana Ospina and Ricardo Silva Romero among many others (Gamboa
2002b). This story takes place in Algiers, and it follows a Colombian
reporter living in Paris who meets Bordewich every night in the bar of
the hotel where he is staying, Hotel El-Aurassi, just like Michalski meets
Bordewich in Hotel Pekín. Both Bordewich and our nameless narrator
are covering the upcoming elections, and exchange a few stories during
their time there. Bordewich tells the narrator the same theory that he
tells Michalski in the novel about human matters, and overall seems to
have the same ideology regarding globalization.
Some of the dialogue from the short story seems to be copied almost
verbatim in Hotel Pekín. It looks like Gamboa reworked his character in
the short story to include him in the novel, and it is interesting to think
that there might be inter-diegetic continuity as well between the two
texts. Yet, the appearance of the character Bordewich in both these texts,
one happening in Algiers, and another one in Beijing, with some of the
same lines, speaks to the textual interchangeability of these two locales to
Gamboa, reinforcing the orientalist reading that Héctor Hoyos (2013)
attributes to Gamboa’s Los impostores, another of Gamboa’s novels set in
Beijing mentioned earlier.
Another dislocated subject in the novel is Li Qiang, who was born in
a rural community in China, but whose life was changed with the explo-
sive modernization in the country in the second half of the twentieth
century. He was an avid student and became an officer in the Chinese
army; he later studied engineering and worked as an engineer at a tele-
communications regional company and after a rapid rise in the corpo-
rate world, moved to the largest telecommunications company in China.
He was finally relocated to Beijing with his family, becoming a star in
the corporate world of Beijing, and now spends his days in meetings and
seminars like Michalski’s. Qiang was displaced, moved by his company
to Beijing, a place he does not like very much, but at the same time, he
seems to have benefited tremendously, along with his family, from the
money that he has made in the process. Despite these large changes in
his life, Li Qiang seems reticent to accept completely the changes hap-
pening in China, he still leads an ascetic lifestyle, and continuously sees
his young adult children’s modern lifestyle of consumption—focused on
fashion and other Western products—to be somewhat unacceptable.
A third dislocated subject in the novel is Ming Cheng, who was
married and had a son with another corporate world workaholic, both
devoted to their work more than their marriage. Eventually, her husband
received a job offer in Hong Kong and not having much to look for-
ward to relationship-wise, he decided to move and took their son with
166 C. A. MALAGÓN
Cheng’s approval as she understood that it would be more beneficial to

him. She started working at the Bank for the Development of Asia to
advance her career and eventually bring her son back to Beijing.
Finally, the protagonist Frank, or Francisco Munévar, is our fourth
prominent dislocated subject in Hotel Pekín. He was a Colombian
national who immigrated to the United States to study, with the help
of relatives, and ended up staying for good. He meets Pat Donovan, a
young Colombo-US American woman who he marries and eventu-
ally divorces. She urged him to change his name, change his demeanor
to appear more US American and become a US citizen. For Pat, any-
thing that would associate them with Latin America would make them
socially inferior. Pat, or Patricia, was also a transplanted Colombian, but
one who was bilingual, educated in American schools, and she believed
it was better to be “norteamericana y hablar inglés sin acento” (Gamboa
2008, p. 12). Michalski accepted her requests because he loved her, but
also because he understood her reasons. In other words, Michalski per-
ceived that his professional life would be marked by these particularities
of name, language and national association and decided to give up his
nationality. He starts utilizing the short Frank instead of the nickname
“Pacho” or his name Francisco, and uses his mother’s maiden name
Michalski, instead of Munévar, a fact that brings attention to, perhaps,
other displacements in his family’s past—and perhaps another level of
dislocation. Frank changes his passport and his nationality at the same
time that he becomes an employee for the company Enhancing the
Future. At first glance, his decision to change his name and to eradicate
any vestige of his relationship to Colombia as his place of origin seems
to have brought him great financial gain through his work, “enhancing
the future” of countless other countries around the world, spreading the
gospel of globalization and consumption as some sort of postmodern
evangelist of globality.
Let us go back for a moment to the discussion of Mi-Mi’s linguistic reg-
ister. As discussed, it is curious that Gamboa picked this seemingly uned-
ucated register for Mi-Mi, and it exacerbates Gamboa’s orientalist gaze
upon Chinese reality in Hotel Pekín. The novel falls under the purview of
what Rebecca Walkowitz calls “born translated” (2015), works of litera-
ture whose likely diegetic language does not correspond to the original
language in which they were written. In this case, a novel mostly written
in Spanish, with a few words in English, but whose dialogues probably take
place mostly in English in the diegetic reality of the story, is different than
the text itself that we are reading. It is important to note this lack of lin-
guistic correspondence because it brings our attention to language, and it
shows that the transpacific connection created by the novel between China
and Latin America, only exists through the mediation of a center of cul-
ture—in this case, I am referring to the English language as an institution
as well as to Frank’s diaspora to the United States. Moreover, let us reflect
upon Gamboa’s choice to include some of Bordewich’s ideas in the short
story “Muy cerca del mar te escribo,” adding another layer of orientalism
to the mix. Not only the language mediating the experience is English, a
neocolonial language, but the interchangeability of location conflates vastly
different cultures and spatialities with the novel’s colonialist gaze.
This transpacific connection occurs in very subtle comments in the
development of the plot as well. As the reader learns, Michalski has an
aversion for his country of origin, Colombia. Yet, the relationship to the
country is not as simple as it seems. After his first set of meetings with
executives, he decides to take a tourist stroll through the city, and ends
up going to Tiananmen Square. When he gets to a corner, he experi-
ences some seemingly strange feelings, “vio la inmensidad de la plaza y
quedó sobrecogido por su tamaño, pero la sensación no fue agradable.
Ese espacio anónimo y repleto de espectros, le avivó viejos temores”
(Gamboa 2008, p. 51). The reference to old fears points to a traumatic
past, perhaps embedded in Michalski’s personal experience in Colombia,
or the political violence of the country in the last fifty years. Later in the
novel, in a conversation about his Colombian nationality, Qiang ques-
tions Michalski about his past—and about his relationship with his for-
mer country. He asks him if he has ever been back there, perhaps taken
his seminar to Colombia. Michalski reacts defensively, explaining that
he owes his former country nothing, and that he did not choose to be
born there, or anywhere else for that matter—it was just random chance.
Right after this, the seemingly belligerent tone of the conversation starts
to dissipate, but Frank utters the following sentences: “A veces mirar
demasiado hacia el pasado nos vuelve ciegos…el pasado es un escenario
repleto de sangre, ríos de sangre corriendo desbordados por el estrecho
canal de los siglos” (2008, p. 98). The lines seem excessive with its ref-
erence to rivers of blood, themselves overflowing out of the conversa-
tion, and out of context. But that feeling of gloom in the first instance
in Tiananmen Square, and his gory lines in the second in the conversa-
tion with Qiang seemed to be triggered by specific situations where the
imaginary of the nation was present. In the first one, Tiananmen Square
168 C. A. MALAGÓN
is a recognizable place of resistance to the Chinese government and an

anthropological place in opposition to the other non-places of the novel
like the hotel or the high-rise financial bank where he is teaching the
seminar. In the second one, the mention of Colombia and the question
of his allegiance to it make the nation literally present in the conversa-
tion. These two negative reactions appear to be a response to the very
idea of the nation: Michalski the international trainer of Enhancing the
Future is a dislocated subject because he finds comfort in the lack of
national communion—perhaps due to a traumatic past, if one were to
read the imaginary in these two instances of repulsion together: political
resistance plus rivers of blood. Michalski feels most comfortable as that
dislocated subject, traveling from place to place, working and jumping
from hotel to airport to another hotel, from one non-place to the next,
without an end in sight.
However, Michalski, as I mentioned earlier, starts doubting his
position as international trainer because of his conversations with
Bordewich and especially Qiang. In one instance, Qiang invites him
to a country home outside of Beijing with his family. Michalski’s first
comment about Qiang’s country home is that such a space could be
effective in breaking in a prospective client in a more relaxed atmos-
phere, and could help close a deal, continuing his labor as a conspic-
uous consumption trainer, looking at the world through the eyes of a
pragmatic capitalist. Michalski configures this country home as a non-
place immediately—a place of transit, consumption and communica-
tion. But Qiang tells him that he has the home only to spend time with
his family outside of the noisy capital city and shows him the view of
the Great Wall from the house. Also, Qiang explains to him that foreign
contractors tried selling homes they had built just on the other side of
the wall, but the Chinese had refused to buy those homes. To be on
one side or another of the Great Wall made a great difference to them,
and being within the walls meant a feeling of security. One must look
no further than the rhetoric of conservative forces in the United States
who want to build a wall in the US–Mexico border, or the appearance
of “countries” or secluded communities in Latin America—with pri-
vate security and vast micro-urban organizations including shopping
centers, schools, supermarkets, completely separated from the rest of
the city (Svampa 2005; Caldeira 2000)—to understand the relevance
and importance of this feeling of comfort and safety. In the novel, this
space of the country home is both a non-place and an anthropologi-

cal place—a place for Qiang who uses it as weekend respite from his
work, and a non-place for Michalski who sees its capital and cultural
value in luring in clients. Qiang’s reflection upon the home highlights
the ambiguity of spatiality in the novel, and Michalski’s own ambiguous
positionality. Not everything needs to have the practicality, transit and
transaction driven paradigm of the non-place. Right after this episode,
Michalski decides that he will no longer do the seminar or work for his
company, in order to reconnect with his son, with whom he has lost
touch since divorcing his wife—he wants to change his life to focus “on
the important things.” In other words, he chooses to settle down in
one place, to focus on his family, to end his dislocation. But at the end
of the novel, he does not go through with it. He sits in the hotel bar
with Bordewich and tells him that he will not do it after all—he will
continue working for Enhancing the Future, traveling around, teaching
seminars, hopping from non-place to non-place.
For Michalski, the space of Colombia, and of Latin America, is the
direct opposite of the non-place. It is the anthropological place—a place
that is historical, relational and concerned with identity—a space asso-
ciated with his past. He chooses a constant state of transit against the
place of the nation. As he chooses to remain dislocated, he does not
make new associations with other anthropological places either—like the
United States, for example, where his son and ex-wife live and where the
headquarters of his office resides. His relationship to the United States
is just as transient as with any other place he visits for work, it is just
another space of transit, communication and consumption. Through
Michalski’s dislocation, Hotel Pekín partially questions the constitutive
imaginary of the nation in particular, and Latin America as a whole,
through a narrative that addresses the opposition between the global
and the local and inscribes the discussion in a space that is not tradition-
ally the space of Latin American narrative: The novel is a representation
of the tension between the global and the national, playing itself out
through these dislocated subjects. Yet, at the end of the novel, out of
all the stories that Bordewich could tell, it seems that he decides to tell
Michalski’s: the story of this dislocated subject becomes, as Bordewich’s
theory tells the reader, the drama that is more representative of the
human condition.
170 C. A. MALAGÓN
The story of Michalski is very similar to the story of some of the

other main characters in the novel as they are all dislocated subjects—
Cheng, Qiang, Bordewich and Mi-Mi. The novel starts as the quest
of a Western protagonist going to China to “modernize” or “civilize”
the East, but ends as a recognition of a shared aspect in the lives of all
the characters: They are all dislocated in their own way. Michalski con-
tinues his work, but he is jaded in a way, no longer seeing the world
as the space onto which to project his cosmopolitan desires of global-
encompassing capitalist utopia. He moves on without necessarily moving
past. The tension between the global and the national is counteracted
by all the characters’ constant dialogue and sharing of stories, and their
recognition that they occupy complicated positionalities beyond these
dichotomic realities. Michalski tells Qiang about his past in Colombia,
about his son Eddy and his continued fights with his ex-wife about what
language his son should speak—Spanish, English or both. Ming Cheng
tells Michalski about her ex-husband and son in Hong Kong, and Qiang
shares with Michalski his discomfort with the changes that a modern
China is bringing to his own household. The novel proposes these char-
acters, dislocated subjects as they are, as representative of the contem-
porary world. Furthermore, Gamboa’s telling of this story—focusing
mostly on Michalski as the hardworking Colombian immigrant in the
United States, finding global success through his work at Enhancing
the Future, and finally having these aforementioned revelatory moments
in China—creates a transpacific connection between China and Latin
America, though this connection is mediated by the center diegetically—
as Michalski is now a US citizen—and para-textually, as the novel was
published by Seix Barral, one of the Barcelona imprints of the Planeta
publishing group. The mobility of peoples and texts through these
urban landscapes is mediated by a globalization that has certain spaces
of power and control, which remain more connected and relevant than
others—think of the global Beijing of the novel, global city and center
of managerial operations, versus the Colombia of Frank Michalski’s
past. Equally, in the Hispanic publishing world, Barcelona is one of the
managerial nodes of literary capital and the exoticist representations of
Beijing, China and its characters of Gamboa’s novel come mediated by
the expectations and work of editors and cultural workers in centers such
as Barcelona—and this relationship has an important incidence upon the
literary culture of Latin America.
Notes
1. And by globalization, I refer here to the creation of networks of peoples,
ideas and goods across the globe; expansion of neoliberal economies; tech-
nological advances that have facilitated these networks and sped up the
mobility of capital, goods and people among other characteristics.
2. According to Augé, non-place is a space that can only be defined in rela-
tion to its contrary: anthropological place. “If anthropological place could
be defined as relational, historical or concerned with identity, then the
space that could not be defined as relational, historical or concerned with
identity would be the non-place” (2008, p. 63). Augé defines this new
space as one of “circulation, consumption and communication” (2008,
p. viii). Spaces such as airports, train stations, the metro are all non-places,
as well as the machines themselves of transit: airplanes, buses, etc. Also,
temporary abodes such as hotels, or even hospitals, can be considered non-
places (2008, p. 63). In the contemporary world, there exists a prolifera-
tion of such places: The life of a human being in the society of the end of
the twentieth century and beginning of the twenty-first is filled with many
encounters with such places.
3. The term unheimlich or uncanny was popularized by Sigmund Freud to
refer to a combination of something that is frightening, secretive and
unfamiliar—defined in contrast to heimlich [homely] (1955, p. 219). The
words heimlich and unheimlich in German have some similar meanings,
including “secretive.” This leads Freud to define uncanny as “something
which is familiar and old-established in the mind and which has become
alienated from it only through the process of repression” (1955, p. 240).
Here, I use the term uncanny and relate it to my concept of dislocation for
its connection in opposition to words such as homely and familiar, but also
for its resonance with feelings of fright and disarray.
4. Bauman himself can be thought of as a dislocated subject. He was born in
1925 in Poznan, Poland and moved to the Soviet Union escaping from
the Nazi persecution of the Jews and the Holocaust. Although he first
studied Physics, he eventually joined the Soviet Army and rose through
the ranks to become captain, until he was expelled during a purge of peo-
ple of Jewish descent in the army in 1953. After this, he got an MA in
sociology and became professor of sociology at Warsaw University. During
student protests in 1968, he would be accused of being an organizer and
instigator, and an intellectual leader of the demonstrations. After a few
years moving through various countries, including Israel and Australia, he
finally settled in England at the University of Leeds where he taught until
his retirement in 1990. Surprisingly, most of his globally known academic
papers and books come from a period post-retirement where he wrote
172 C. A. MALAGÓN
tirelessly about postmodernity, liquid modernity and globalization (Tester

2004, pp. 1–3). Critics of Bauman have pointed out that during his tenure
as a Soviet officer he was part of the Polish Secret Service, questioning his
moral stance toward the Stalinist Regime (Best 2013, pp. 10–15). His life
was one of ambivalence, first being a member of the Soviet Army, and the
Worker’s Party in Poland, but finally renouncing Communism and mov-
ing to England where he would become a global academic star, equally
critical of capitalism, globalization and consumer society. His biography
is certainly characteristic of the term nomad, not only in his movement
throughout the world, but in his ideological changes throughout his life.
5. In an earlier essay, Bauman details four different types of mobile subjects in
the late twentieth century society: The stroller, the vagabond, the tourist
and the player, which he uses in opposition to the concept of pilgrim–—a
term he describes as a form of travel where the end goal of travel itself is
one of meaning formation. As opposed to pilgrims, these four new types
of travelers in the global world highlight the discontinuities in the type of
experiences inherent to postmodernity and to the atomization of society:
The stroller is the urban flâneur, the vagabond is that subject that is con-
tinuously pushed out of settlements, the tourist moves through the world
trying to make all spaces his own and, finally, the player moves throughout
the world, like in a game, without commiseration, compassion or a care
in the world (“From Pilgrim to Tourist” [Bauman 1996]). Eventually, in
Globalization: The Human Consequences (Bauman 2005), he settles on
the concepts of “tourists” and “vagabonds,” somewhat reformulated from
these original concepts.
6. The texts previously mentioned, but also El síndrome de Ulises [The Ulysses
Syndrome] (2005), Necrópolis [Necropolis] (2009) and Plegarias nocturnas
[Night Prayers] 2012, among others (Porras 2008).
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Globalization. Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press.
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John Howe. New York: Verso.
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Identity.” In Questions of Cultural Identity, edited by Stuart Hall and Paul Du
Gay, 18–36. London: Sage.
———. 2005. Globalization: The Human Consequences. Cambridge: Polity.
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São Paulo. Berkeley: University of California Press.
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———. 2005. El síndrome de Ulises. Bogotá: Planeta.
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of World Literature. New York: Columbia University Press.
CHAPTER 9
Roberto Bolaño’s Urban Labyrinths:

The City as Metaphor for the
Silent Universe
Juan Pablo Melo
Despite the now extensive critical bibliography coalesced around the work
of Roberto Bolaño, little has been written about the image of the urban
in his writing. This state of affairs begs the question: What is the logic
of the urban, of the image and representation of the city, in Bolaño’s fic-
tion? To answer this question, account must be made of two constitutive
and intertwined elements of Bolaño’s work. There is, on the one hand,
the construction of Bolaño’s works: Chris Andrews has argued that by its
very design Bolaño’s fiction tends in the direction of constant expansion.
There is, on the other, Héctor Hoyos’ proposition that at least Bolaño’s
most voluminous novels, The Savage Detectives and 2666, are character-
ized by Aleph-like logics—that is, that these novels evince the impossible
desire to articulate a totalizing vision of globality, to stage in compressed
form the limitless world in its infinite complexity (Hoyos 2015). It is
my sense that this Aleph-like logic is at work in the entirety of Bolaño’s
J. P. Melo (*) 
Modern Thought and Literature, Stanford University,
Stanford, CA, USA

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-92438-0_9
176 J. P. MELO
fiction, an assertion that can be made consistent with the proposition that
the Chilean’s writing is characterized by a genetic propensity to expan-
sion. Not only is each element of Bolaño’s fiction a root that sprouts fur-
ther roots; as a thinker of immanence, Bolaño sees literature as part of the
world and therefore as internally remaking the world (Hoyos 2015, pp.
13–14). In method and form, Bolaño’s work stretches out to totality and
not only seeks to convey but also to reshape the totality of the world. The
consciousness of Bolaño’s oeuvre is planetary in scope.
If this is correct, little can be said about the image of the urban as
manifest in Bolaño’s work without taking these two elements—design
tailored to expansion and an Aleph-like logic—into account. More
specifically, this means coming to terms with the idea that Bolaño’s liter-
ary work qua Aleph, in commenting on globality from a Latin American
perspective, entails a critique of dominant discourses of globalization.
As Hoyos notes: “at a distance from the Cold War and not entirely
subsumed under the logic of the War on Terror, contemporary Latin
American writers have an unprecedented chance at imagining the world
differently, at modeling an alternate globality” (2015, p. 21). This is not
to suggest that Bolaño proposes a thoroughly consistent discourse on
globality characterized by comprehensiveness and order. If he proposes
a new attitude toward the global as such, it is one that distrusts static or
centered panopticism, and sees as illusion any ideal of synthetic integra-
tion. Nonetheless, it is from a peripheral Latin American perspective, one
schooled, as Hoyos has emphasized, in negotiating multiple geo-cultural
positionalities, one able therefore to hold on to a specific geo-cultural
frame even as it engages with the totalizing optics of the global as figure,
that the role of the urban in the work of Bolaño can be understood in at
least two of its primary dynamics. The first of these deals with the image
and figure of the urban as metaphor for and representation of emergent
global configurations of the urban as these spawn new global publics and
new spatial coordinates. This function of the image of the city relates to
a fundamental Bolaño theme: the unruly proliferation of art and social
practices as they elude institutional regularization and categorization.
The second dynamic features the urban as multidimensional Aleph, as
labyrinthine object that begs the detective’s exegesis. In this capacity,
the figure of the urban (1) not only represents the materialization of the
world under a given project of globalization; more importantly (2) as
eidetic metaphor for the global it ties the achievement of an ethical stance
to the cognitive mapping of globalized space.
9 ROBERTO BOLAÑO’S URBAN LABYRINTHS … 177
These dynamics escape the purview of one of the few sustained anal-
yses of the figure of the city in Bolaño that I am aware of, Fernando
Saucedo Lastra’s México en la obra de Roberto Bolaño: Memoria y
territorio. Mexico City in The Savage Detectives is presented by Saucedo
Lastra as a space that progresses from sense to senselessness; in other
words, that contains micro-worlds of meaning that are destabilized
through deeper explorations into the metropolitan fabric and wider
gazes out toward the urban horizon. Mexico City as seen through the
eyes of the young Juan García Madero is initially a space that represents
youthful certainty and a stable lettered canon. This stable vision of the
urban progressively opens itself to multiple realities, to an opaqueness
which suddenly makes it hard to read. Cities are “no longer images of
modernity and of progress, but almost organic megalopolises that grow
like viruses, anonymous spaces that incite chaos and the fall” (Saucedo
Lastra 2015, p. 101). Much of Saucedo Lastra’s analysis focuses on the
contrast between Mexico City and the Sonoran Desert, between the city
as a space of heterogeneity and the desert as a space of silence and empti-
ness, the latter presaging the devolution of order into disorder, of kinet-
ics into cosmic cooling. This reading of the figure of the urban in Bolaño
redounds on a now fragmented subject, as the urban becomes the stag-
ing ground for Bolaño’s elaboration of the deeply experiential and there-
fore fragmented nature of space and time. Evocative as this reading may
be, my interest here is with understanding how the fragmentation of
space and time represented by Bolaño in his images of the city signals a
diagnosis of a given form of globalization.
Perhaps the most commented upon detective figures of Bolaño’s
oeuvre are Juan García Madero, Arturo Belano, and Ulises Lima, of The
Savage Detectives; the four critics, Oscar Fate, and Oscar Amalfitano,
of 2666; and Abel Romero, Bibiano O’Ryan, and the unnamed narra-
tor of Distant Star. Meanwhile, the most present urban palimpsests
in the Bolaño universe are Mexico City and the fictional Santa Teresa.
However, in the spirit of backing up the claim that Bolaño’s works in
general function as Alephs or as constituent elements of one enormous
Aleph, and that the urban as labyrinth is central to their/its logic, I
want to focus on some of Bolaño’s minor works. The first of these texts
is “El policía de las ratas” or “The Rat Police” (Bolaño 2003), a story
that explodes its own finitude through the intertextual gesture of pos-
iting a sequel of sorts to Kafka’s “Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse
Folk” (Kafka 1971). In “The Rat Police” Josephine the Singer’s nephew,
178 J. P. MELO
Pepe el Tira, is marked, like his aunt, as different from the average rat.
Joining the police force, Pepe soon finds himself exploring a labyrinth
of underground sewers and rat tunnels, carrying out the task of tracking
down and retrieving the bodies of victims of snakes and other predators.
Developing the habit of straying into the most peripheral and danger-
ous of tunnels and sewers, Pepe becomes engaged in the search for a rat
who has gone missing from a borderland explorer colony. Her murdered
body marks the first of a series of crimes that Pepe is convinced have
been committed by a fellow rat. Dissuaded from further inquiry into the
matter, assured by his superiors that rats do not kill other rats, Pepe per-
sists in his investigation, eventually tracking down the rat serial killer.
This audacious sequel maintains the contents of Kafka’s tale. The
characters in both stories are rats that behave like rats even as they
share formal—institutional and communicational—characteristics with
humans. The setting in both stories is the claustrophobic world of the
communal rodents, a life-world whose material correlate is a labyrin-
thine system of sewer and rat tunnels (more implied than described in
Kafka’s tale). Just as in the Kafka tale, the rats and mice in Bolaño’s tale
live lives beset by existential threat. Similarly, Bolaño’s rats and mice are
obdurately communal and generally unreflective creatures consumed by
the task of burrowing in search of food while avoiding floods, poison,
and predators. Determined in their habits by necessity, by well-defined
hierarchy developed over the longue durée, the rats shun any behaviors
characterized by individual license or inofficiousness. Driven to burrow
and seek food to feed their ever-expanding numbers, forged as a species
by material exigency, the rodents have little in the way of childhood or
leisure. They therefore have little use or care for art. Kafka’s story latches
upon this zero-level state of existence, life reduced to its barest elements,
to reflect on the nature of art. The rats and mice are a weary race con-
stantly in the throes of danger. The need to abide by the imperatives of
reproduction structures their apprehension to the phenomenon of song
as it is articulated in the performances of Josephine. Her piping has no
unique quality except Josephine’s thematization of it in performance.
This alone confers upon her performances the quality of art. It is this
claim to indulge fully in the refinement of purposeless activity—an activ-
ity practiced without artistic pretensions by all the other rats, usually dur-
ing work—that pits Josephine against her community.
This is an opposition nonetheless subsumed within a dialectic
resolving itself in favor of the community’s practical imperatives. To
Josephine’s moody antics and haughty demands for attention and cele-
bration there is the community’s condescending acquiescence and pater-
nal care. To Josephine’s perpetual sense of the artist’s solitude there is
the community’s reception of her art in their “unlettered” terms. To
Josephine’s petitions for abstention from work there is the communi-
ty’s silent refusal, solidified by an intractable practical sense that makes
it impossible for them to seriously consider such demands. As allegory,
Kafka’s tale parallels Adorno and Horkheimer’s infamous interpretation
of Odysseus’ sailing past the Sirens in their essay on Enlightenment.
“Their [the Sirens’] allurement is that of losing oneself in the past.
But the hero exposed to it has come of age in suffering. In the mul-
titude of mortal dangers which he has had to endure, the unity of his
life, the identity of the person, has been hardened” (Adorno 2002,
p. 25). What Adorno says of Odysseus could well be applied to the rats
as communal subject. Just as Adorno locates in the psyche of Odysseus
that liminal space where myth rubs against Enlightenment, so the effect
of Josephine’s song on the rats indexes the dialectic entwinement of
ritualistic and autonomous art. Despite their apprehension in the face
of Josephine’s sublime art, in the “brief intervals between their strug-
gles our people dream, it is as if the limbs of each were loosened, as if
the harried individual once in a while could relax and stretch himself at
ease in the great, warm bed of the community. And into these dreams
Josephine’s piping drops note by note; she calls it pearl-like, we call it
staccato; but at any rate here it is in its right place… Something of our
poor brief childhood is in it, something of lost happiness that can never
be found again, but also something of active daily life, of its small gai-
eties, unaccountable and yet springing up and not to be obliterated”
(Kafka 1971, p. 370).
Bolaño’s story interjects into this space of inquiry as to the sig-
nificance of art in a world driven by economic necessity, yet it acts on
Kafka’s tale by mutating its genetic code, not least through the applica-
tion of the detective genre as organizing framework. Whatever else “The
Rat Police” happens to be—police procedural, fable—it flaunts, by dint
of its intertextual relations, affinity to discourses about the possibility and
existence of art in a world beset by Sisyphean toil. Yet even the bound-
aries of the meta-aesthetic are ultimately superseded, or at least punc-
tured, by a dialectic that transcends aesthetics: the theme of “The Rat
Police” is the nightmare of history allegorized as the struggle for order
in a chaotic universe, portrayed as an individual’s search for meaning in
180 J. P. MELO
a universe characterized by the silence of technological precision—to

borrow Manfredo Tafuri’s phrase (1976, p. 42). Inverting the positive
and negative poles in Kafka’s story, Bolaño grounds the meditation on
art. Kafka’s piece presents Josephine’s art from the perspective of a nar-
rator imbued with the rat society’s communal values, thus making the
life of economic and demographic imperative, the realm of self-main-
tenance, the determinately negative realm of the narration. Bolaño’s
story, by contrast, features a narrator who shares few of his aunt’s artis-
tic qualities but nonetheless, as the story progresses, transgresses the
boundaries of his rat life-world, approximating something of Josephine’s
Nietzschean perspective. As such, in Bolaño’s story it is the world of art
as sublime purposelessness which becomes the determinately negative
space inscribed in the piece—so diminished as to be registered only in
the intertextual connection to Kafka’s story and in the obvious fact of
the text’s nature as literary artifact. This shift having taken place, Bolaño
expands—through the formal element of the detective genre—the level
of positive detail as it relates to the material life of the rats, specifically
their space of action: the labyrinth of underground sewers and tunnels
that forms the setting of the story.
Bolaño’s expansive operation reconfigures Kafka’s story-framework via
a method that according to Andrews—borrowing Barthes’ concepts—
forms the basis of the Chilean’s fiction-making system (Andrews 2014,
p. 35). Using indices (diffusive concepts that add to the meaning of the
story, informing the reader about character or setting) and catalyzers
(functions or actions that connect key moments of the story, even if they
are not central to its development), Bolaño fills in details about the rat’s
material realm of action. Meanwhile, the story relies on the police proce-
dural framework, on the conventions of literary crime-solving: extended
movement through space and the cognitive mapping of that space, as
well as the archeological registering and cataloguing of traces of move-
ments and social practices in that space. This very movement, intrinsic
to the narrative form, creates the condition for indices and catalyzers
to expand the story’s field of inquiry. What results is the depiction and
exploration of a labyrinthine space that features an urban dimension of
post-apocalyptic or science fictional impress.
Obsessed with finding the rat assassin, Pepe begins to frequent the
most peripheral and isolated of tunnels and rat colonies, in the process
providing the reader with a social and material cartography of the rat life-
world. “Hablaba con la gente de las cosas más trascendentes. Conocí una
colonia de ratas-topo que vivían entre nosotros ejerciendo los oficios más
humildes” (Bolaño 2003, p. 71). Pepe also meets an old white-haired
rat who speaks of having been born in a surface laboratory where he was
inoculated with a deadly disease meant to wipe out black-haired sewer
rats. Despite the deaths of many rats the white rats and the black rats
feverishly reproduced; the black rats not only became immune to the
virus, but a new species of brown rat emerged that was impervious to
all viruses. Later in his investigation, Pepe runs into an explorer colony
of rats that lives at the very margins of the known rodent territory and
consequently displays a healthy suspicion of the institutional authority
represented by Pepe. These rats speak of having opened tunnels to the
surface, where they sometimes spend entire days exploring the sprawl of
semi-ruinous human buildings.
Whether it is implied or not that humanity has been wiped out by a
virus of its own creation, with the figure of ruinous urban spaces Bolaño
gestures in his story at a post-apocalyptic situation, one where the ruins
of human cities remain to be mined and explored by an ever-expand-
ing horde of rats, the inheritors of the earth. Like a dark celestial object,
these rumors of a defunct and ruined human urbanscape—which arise
through indexical and catalyzing elements, and therefore appear of sec-
ondary importance—exert an inescapable gravitational force on the
material world depicted in Bolaño’s story. In a play of mirrors, these
post-apocalyptic images cast a framing light on the underground laby-
rinth of tunnels and sewers where the life of the rats goes on as usual:
production, reproduction, expansion. In this way, the frenetic and com-
pulsive reproduction of the rats is transfigured allegorically into a fable
of humanity’s self-destruction. In turn, readers are confronted with an
image of their very practices of production and its relation to the pro-
duction of space.
As it turns out, the tale’s exoskeleton of labyrinthine space and
bifurcating paths is the key to situating its mediation on evil. The sto-
ry’s immanent construction and allegorical code depict the struggle to
forge meaning in some as-yet untheorized globalized space, one char-
acterized by an expansion proceeding through instrumental reason and
tending to destruction and extinction. Let me emphasize that Bolaño’s
construction is not be interpreted along the lines of the traditional
model of the fable. The point is not that the reading subject, faced by
the fable, finds reflected the image of a moral lesson, the fanciful animal
receptacle of the story shedding its surface to reveal a socially binding
182 J. P. MELO
normative claim. The refracted allegory, under the pull of the post-apoc-
alyptic urban images produced by Bolaño, shoots past the life-world level
in the direction of the object realm. The dialectical play of images does
not arrest itself at the level of the ethical, as initially signified in the final
showdown between Pepe and Héctor (the rat serial killer). The ethical
inquiry is transcended through the injunction of the ostensible negative
spatial realm in the story (the above-ground urban space), which signals
a higher-level allegory that links the forms of production of the rats to a
specific framework of tunnels. In short, it links a form of production and
reproduction to the production of space.
Note the inversion of the static quality of Kafka’s tale. The latter takes
place in an amorphous vacuum within which Josephine, the rat com-
munity, art, production and reproduction, figure as broad categories in
tension. In Bolaño’s story, a shift away from high art as subject to the
popular genre of the detective tale as framework facilitates the creation
of an incidental cartography of space that in its becoming picks up an
apparently disparate set of elements and brings them into new relation.
In this context, the ethical dimension of Bolaño’s story takes on new
meanings. Pepe’s confrontation with Héctor, the rat murderer, is punc-
tuated by Héctor’s enigmatic words: Héctor asserts that he shares some-
thing in common with Josephine and Pepe, and this something is radical
fear. Pepe responds that Josephine was not afraid, only insane, and that
Héctor is mentally disturbed and incapable of fear. Héctor, however,
assures Pepe that Josephine was full of fear, with each musical perfor-
mance perishing and recomposing herself through an engagement with
that fear. “Yo soy una rata libre,” Héctor concludes, “Puedo habitar el
miedo y sé perfectamente hacia dónde se encamina nuestro pueblo”
(Bolaño 2003, p. 81).
Accounting for the unpacking of the symbolic function of the fig-
ure of the urban that was carried out above, this exchange can be taken
as commentary on the state of the ethical in a meaningless universe,
one privy only to the imperatives of instrumental reason. Considering
Josephine’s, Pepe’s and Héctor’s stances, the Nietzschean perspective
can be seen to devolve into three ethical positions: the negative of art
singing its utopian themes, theorized by Adorno as a form of sublime
negativity that places a critical mirror up to a fallen world; the ethical
stance of the brave detective who resists evil even though he knows
that the battle is lost from the outset or is only ever won momentarily;
and the renunciation of the ethical altogether, the full incursion into
the irrational. By setting this ethical dimension in a larger dialectic that

encompasses categories such as production, reproduction, the produc-
tion of space, and extinction, these stances are brought into the orbit
of what Manfredo Tafuri (1976) has referred to as the anguish under-
lying the ethical imperatives of bourgeois art. According to Tafuri, the
modern metropolis as the space of pure alienation, as the materialization
of a universe of technological precision, is the tragic stage for a bour-
geois perspective that “freely” contemplates human destiny bound to
the mechanical exigencies of production. On the one hand, Weber and
Nietzsche react to the irresoluble value crisis brought on by the disin-
tegration of the transcendental by positing a freedom from subjectivity
realizable in a higher-order synthesis, in a global rationalization charac-
terized by the harmonizing of tensions between labor and capital, the
spirit and necessity. On the other, the avant-garde’s relentless destruc-
tion of the symbolic attributes of linguistic signs leads them to discover
a silent universe of technological precision dominated by the laws of
production. Here are marked the two paths of avant-garde art. The first,
to render the shock of the urban subject “active” by idealizing the con-
tradictions of the city. The second, to fully explore the techniques for
communicating the irrational as these are transformed by the city (Tafuri
1976, pp. 92–98). What is the distance between the rat detective’s
heroic stance and the two paths followed by avant-garde art as diagnosed
by Tafuri? This distance between responses to perceived meaninglessness
measures the significance of the urban in Bolaño. This is a distance that
can only be measured through a short detour.
The second story I want to focus on is “El hijo del coronel” or “The
Coronel’s Son.” This Bolaño tale features an unknown speaker who nar-
rates for an unknown audience the main outlines and scenes of a B movie
viewed on late-night television. The narrator’s introduction constructs
a negative-oriented framework, the function of a mirror-effect between
disparate levels of reality and intra and extra narrative elements that refer
to each other by implication and by a form of determinate negation.
“No os lo vais a creer, pero ayer por la noche, a eso de las cuatro de la
madrugada, vi en la tele una película que era mi biografía o mi auto-
biografía o un resumen de mis días en el puto planeta Tierra” (Bolaño
2007, p. 31). According to the narrator, who christens the movie The
Son of the Coronel, the film is of a profoundly “democratic” and “revo-
lutionary” nature. Not because the film itself innovates filmic language
in any formal sense but rather because it “respiraba y exhalaba un aire
184 J. P. MELO
de revolución, digamos un aire en el que se intuía la revolución, no la

revolución completa, para que me entendáis, sino un trozo más bien
minúsculo, microsópico, de la revolución, como si vieras, por ejemplo,
Parque Jurásico y no apareciera ningún dinosaurio por ninguna parte,
vaya, como si en Parque Jurásico nadie mencionara ni una sola vez a un
jodido reptil, pero la presencia de éstos fuera omnipresente e insoporta-
ble” (2007, p. 32).
The film itself, a low-budget B production full of commonalities,
prejudices and clichés, features as its negative something of world-his-
torical significance. That something, however, is to be found at the
margins of the film. Determinate negation is posited by the narrator,
and in turn by Bolaño, as the proper interpretive code for approaching
imaginary film and textual narrative. Other factors emphasize this con-
stitutive negative-oriented framing. The imaginary film in the story is
a zombie film, a genre of high allegorical charge. This charge, the nar-
rator points out, was mobilized by George Romero at the service of a
Marxist-oriented cultural critique. Yet the film in question also inverts
this allegorical frame: “el transfondo político de la película de anoche
era Arthur Rimbaud y Alfred Jarry. Pura locura francesa” (2007, p. 32).
Furthermore, the story’s film, despite lacking any sense of humor, causes
the narrator to laugh like a madman. Finally, the film does not depict
a collective tragedy, as in Romero, but features as its subject the story
of a teenager, the coronel’s son. This (mis)direction, however, can also
be read as a form of attuning the reader to the collective as it appears
at the edges of Bolaño’s tale, most emphatically in the narrator’s critical
commentary.
So far, it has been shown that in “The Son of the Colonel” a net-
work of oppositions is constructed that features as one of its effects the
juxtaposition of fictional film production and fictional spectatorship with
actual cultural production and reception, and which highlights the rela-
tionship between image production and that which remains out of frame.
This dialectical framework, which always orients itself toward the neg-
ative, toward the shimmering outline of mundane objects framed in a
faint collective horizon, is fundamental to understanding the image of
the urban that will be developed in this by-all-appearances trifling piece.
In broad strokes, the fictional film presents the story of the coronel’s son
and a girl named Julie. Julie somehow ends up at the military base where
the coronel works and where the coronel’s son is visiting. Lost in the
underground labyrinth of tunnels beneath the base, Julie opens a door
behind which she finds a zombie. Attempting to escape through the net-
work of tunnels, Julie is aided by the coronel’s son. The couple man-
age to escape, but not before Julie is bitten by the zombie. When they
emerge on the surface Julie is already well on her way to transforming
into a zombie. Looking for food, the couple enters a convenience store.
Shortly thereafter the store is held up by “four Mexicans.” In the strug-
gle that ensues one of these Mexicans is bitten by Julie. The rest of the
film features Julie and the coronel’s son fleeing from the revenge-driven
Mexicans—now transformed into zombies—across a ruinous urban
landscape.
Taking into consideration the negative-oriented frame of the story,
its substance can easily be situated somewhere other than in the content
of a banal cinematic romance and horror flick. The network of opposi-
tions founded on negativity as signaled by the zombie genre qua allegor-
ical instrument extends to the story fabric itself, rendering its substance
the commentary on the urban setting of the imaginary film, its produc-
tion, and the nature of the action presented in it, as carried out in the
unnamed narrator’s critical commentary on the film. This commentary
begins a soon as Julie and the coronel’s son exit the labyrinthine sewers
that connect military base to the city. “Cuando salen a la superficie el
hambre de Julie es incontrolable. Las calles de la ciudad, por otra parte,
presentan un aspecto desolador. Probablemente las locaciones están ubi-
cadas en el extrarradio de cualquier ciudad norteamericana, barrios aban-
donados, semirruinosos, en donde los cineastas sin dinero filman pasada
la medianoche y que es el sitio por donde emergen el hijo del coronel
Reynolds y Julie” (2007, p. 34).
What is of interest in this description is that the urban images in ques-
tion present an amorphous space that nonetheless points to a recogniza-
ble urban form, one corresponding to the North American metropolis.
“Cuando la pareja abandona la red de pasillos subterráneos el paisaje, de
alguna manera, nos resulta familiar. El alumbrado es deficiente, los vid-
rios de los edificios están rotos, casi no circulan coches” (2007, p. 35).
Also of interest is that this immediate recognition is carried out by a non-
North American spectator. “El hijo [del coronel] parece un joven tonto,
un joven alocado, un joven temerario y poco reflexivo, como fuimos
nosotros, solo que él habla en inglés y vive su particular desierto en un
barrio destrozado de una megaurbe norteamericana y nosotros hablamos
en español (o algo parecido) y vivimos y nos ahogamos en las avenidas
desoladas de las ciudades latinoamericanas” (2007, p. 35). Within the
186 J. P. MELO
negative-oriented framework of the story there appears another dia-

lectical relation between elements in tension: that between the North
American city and Latin American city. This opposition is constituted in
an image that can be geographically defined as North American but cor-
responds in its form to Latin American urban space. The gap between
two geographically disparate urbanscapes is narrowed by the Latin
American film spectator/narrator, who not only indexes the geographi-
cal specificity of the image in question but also links it to a global urban
form. In this framing, the Latin American urban space is the negative sig-
nified by the generic image of the North American city.
As made clear by the narrator, this is a relationship made possible by
an identified common experience of marginalization. But before com-
menting further on this transnational urban experience of precarity, it is
important to focus for a moment on the narrator’s positionality. Perhaps
the unnamed narrator of the film is Arturo Belano, fictional Chilean-
Mexican poet and protagonist of The Savage Detectives. If that is the case,
another relation of elements implied by determinate negation is registered
at the level of speech-form: the narration is first carried out in a markedly
“Iberian” and decidedly non-Latin American urban slang that is mostly
shed as the narration proceeds—thus further highlighting its performative
dimension. This speech act signals a performative attunement to reception
by a specific public, one that is possibly Iberian, young, and urban. Even
an ironic or ludic appropriation of this slang could indicate rapport with
this potential audience. On the other hand, if this narration is directed
at a Latin American audience, the appropriation of this slang could high-
light the unique position of annunciation of Arturo Belano (and Roberto
Bolaño) as Latin American writer residing in Spain. The multiple position-
alities evinced in the narrator’s description of the film therefore bring into
relation at least three potential publics spread across three disparate geo-
graphical locations: North America, Latin America, and Europe. Through
the act of spectatorship of a B movie these disparate publics come to con-
stitute, however briefly, one unified public. This public is not constituted
by language or geographical setting but by a form of spectatorship qual-
ified by the capacity to identify the geographical provenance of a form of
the urban, and to identify in that image a common urban experience. The
spectatorship practice transcends a viewership that is parochial or stable in
terms of geography or culture, embodying a potential transnational public
that has as its space of activation the atomized living room and as its vehi-
cle of realization the late-night B movie projected on television.
As with “The Rat Police,” the dialectical movement initiated by

allegory transcends its traditional frame. Just as fable is implicated in a
movement whereby the ethical is transcended in the direction of a global
plane signified by the urban, so in “The Coronel’s Son” the allegorical
function signaled by the zombie genre qua sign of allegory points to
ever-expanding dimensions external to the film: namely, film production,
the production of space, urban experience, and ultimately the very act of
TV spectatorship as constitutive of new oppositional publics unified by
common yet transnational urban experiences. The problematic concept
“oppositional publics” was articulated in the West German media-
theoretical debates of the 1960s–1970s. Contra Jürgen Habermas’
notion of the public sphere as an idealized discursive space open to all
and premised on rational discussion without power imbalances or other
communicative distortions, Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge empha-
sized the particularities and differences of multiple and protean publics
whose unique “context of living” and “horizon of experience” finds
only a distorted representation within the dominant public sphere. In
Negt and Kluge’s analysis, in advanced capitalist society the dominant
public seeks to contain oppositional counterpublics (Gegenöffentlichkeit)
(Hansen 2012, p. xv). The classical public sphere of newspapers, par-
liaments, clubs and political parties, although it still serves to lend
legitimacy to the notion of a unified public sphere, is suffused by indus-
trialized public spheres of production (Produktionsöffentlichkeiten).
The latter are geared toward incorporating so-called private realms—
the production process and the context of living—within the dominant
framework of commodity production and consumption (Negt and Kluge
2016, p. 13). These production spheres, the industries of mass publicity
and cultural production and consumption, intertwine with the institu-
tions of the classical public sphere (political publicity, lobbyists, the press,
etc.) to produce a dominant ideology founded on the construction of an
image and idea of a unified public sphere.
I find Negt and Kluge’s articulation of the public sphere as a con-
tested terrain useful for thinking about the image of the urban in
Bolaño’s “The Coronel’s Son.” As has been shown, it is through a dia-
lectic intrinsic in the mechanics of this story, one that opens itself up
to the question of spectatorship as such, that the representation of an
emergent transnational public is made palpable. It is furthermore at
the level of the recognition of a given urban form, that of the North
American city, that this transnational public is rendered “active.” The
188 J. P. MELO
Latin American (if Europe-based) narrator’s solidarity with the young

protagonist of the film arises through identification with a shared urban
experience of marginality and decay. In this context, the image of the
city in “The Coronel’s Son” signals a global process of the production
of space characterized by the proliferation of urban wastelands and mar-
ginalized urban populations. Though Bolaño does not give a name to
the form of development which gives rise to and depends on this space,
it is enough for current purposes to point to the figure of Santa Teresa:
with its multinational maquiladoras as machines for transforming human
life into products for mass consumption, these signal the predatory and
destructive nature of global capitalist expansion. The process of the
global production of space in turn correlates to the proliferation of new
oppositional publics whose forms of spectatorship do not fit within the
framework of classic bourgeois forms of culture. Even the cultural prod-
ucts with which these publics engage are characterized by precarity: that
of paltry film crews and sidelined actors who film and act in the desolate
peripheries of sprawling metropoles.
Bolaño, however, is also quick to depict the limits imposed on such
a public. The vehicle of this public’s activation is situated in terrain
contested by production public spheres and independent cultural prac-
tices. The Chilean writer does this by evoking the unidirectional flow
of images, a process reflective of uneven global economic, political, and
technological structures. The Latin American spectator can critically
asses the images of the North American city, and in turn begin to reflect
on the production of (dead) space as it relates to a global phenome-
non. Nonetheless, this is unfortunately mostly a one-way process: criti-
cal consciousness is a function of structural imbalance. This dynamic is
most eloquently symbolized in the representation of the foreigners and
Mexicans in the story’s fictional zombie film. Once on the surface Julie
and the coronel’s son head to a convenience store in search of food. “Es
la típica tienda que permanece abierta hasta las tres o las cuatro de la
mañana. Una tienda cochambrosa en donde las latas de comida se alin-
ean junto a las chocolatinas y las bolsas de patatas fritas. Sólo hay un
dependiente en su interior. Por supuesto, es un extranjero y por su edad
y por la expresión de ansiedad y rabia que le cruza la cara no puede ser
más que el proprietario” (Bolaño 2007, p. 35). This is a reminder of the
film’s clichéd themes, but also an observation that serves to condition
the depiction of the four Mexicans who will come to be central char-
acters in the narrative. The Mexicans, who enter the store shortly after
Julie and the coronel’s son, are portrayed in the film as “tres chicos y una
chica, veinteañeros, abobaliconados, dispuestos a morir en un callejón
cualquiera” (2007, p. 36). Yet the stereotyped representation of urban
Mexican-American youth is undercut by the narrator’s commentary on
the actors playing these youths. “Uno los puede imaginar con igual fac-
ilidad estudiando interpretación dramática en una escuela como repar-
tiendo droga en las esquinas de su barrio o recogiendo tomates con los
braceros de John Steinbeck” (2007, p. 36).
Through a spatial and temporal dislocation of the image carried
out by the narrator, a figure that has become reified within the North
American urban imaginary is exploded from within. The dissonance
between the portrayal of Latin Americans in a North American cultural
product and the Latin American’s perspectival capacity to recognize
the artificiality of this portrayal, points, if understood within the system
of determinate negations constitutive of the story, at the disjunction
between a briefly constituted public and the experience of multiple oppo-
sitional publics. The recognition of this disjunction between cultural
representation and horizon of experience therefore activates a truly dif-
ferentiated oppositional public: one that sees the distortion of its image
in the products of the “production public spheres,” and recognizes these
as mystifying portraits of a horizon of experience. The Latin American
narrator of the story is not shocked by the distorted representations of
Chicano/Mexican youth mobilized to dramatic effect in the low-budget
zombie film. On the contrary, she or he shows a clear understanding of
these representations as clichés, a perspective related to the narrator’s
depiction of the film as humorless yet full of laughs. Considering the film
as pure cliché within a network of determinate negations signaled by the
allegorical charge of the zombie genre qua sign of allegory, renders the
whole exercise of the movie one of pure irony, perhaps purposely so on
the filmmaker’s part. One could argue that this is what the narrator of
the film refers to when he talks about its revolutionary nature. What the
film portrays is not a love story or a horror tale or even a parade of cli-
chés (though these are, evidently, the content of the film). The material
receptacle for these actions, and the ironic attitude toward these actions
and representations, both from the perspective of filmmakers and spec-
tators, constitutes the very subject matter of the film—as understood
through the narrator’s critical commentary.
If this is the case, the oppositional public referred to by Bolaño in “The
Coronel’s Son” is characterized by an ironic stance toward the themes and
190 J. P. MELO
concepts that constitute a hegemonic cultural discourse on the urban, and

in turn, the global. The urban wasteland depicted in the film activates this
public, providing a representation of the production of space with which
it is well acquainted. These spaces are also receptacles for a whole set of
figures whose marginalized status is represented, from an ironic perspec-
tive, by pushing the dominant public sphere’s imaginary of The Other to
cartoonish conclusions. What the viewers of this late-night television film
see is their own negative, their own stereotyped images, which they are
immediately able to identify as distorted representations of their specific
life practices within a given horizon of experience—an experience that is
global, urban, and features a recognizable, transnational landscape. In this
sense, the spectator’s solidarity with the figures portrayed in the film is
made comprehensive by a shared experience of marginality in urban con-
glomerations characterized by deterioration and precarity.
At this point, I think Bolaño’s image of the urban can be better appre-
hended in terms of its function and meaning. The image of the city pre-
sented in Bolaño’s works is one that links a project of globalization qua
capitalist expansion to a given production of space. An assessment of this
project and of its spatial configurations is evident in “The Rat Police,”
where an analogical relation is forged between an extinct humanity sur-
vived by its sprawling urban ruins and an ever-expanding network of
underground tunnels resulting from the rat’s blind and frenetic reproduc-
tion. Similarly, in the “The Coronel’s Son,” the emergence of a transna-
tional public characterized by precarity is a function of an interlinked global
dynamic of capitalist expansion and proliferation of deteriorated spaces. The
emergence of an economic and urban system of planetary proportions is
linked to the formation of marginalized publics with an increasingly plan-
etary consciousness, as reflected in transnational spectatorship practices
mediated through, in this instance, late-night television and B-level produc-
tions. It is as a function of structural imbalances, as signaled by the unidirec-
tional flow of images and shared experiences of precarity, that the possibility
for a Nietzschean perspective can arise and an ethical stance be constructed.
The urban in Bolaño is an Aleph for the global in its neoliberal instan-
tiation. This optic is ever present even in the Chilean’s most minute
interventions. Yet, in Bolaño this global field is depicted not as trending
toward any sort of synthetic rationalization, toward the formation of a
stable and unitary public sphere within which a global culture could be
signified, a form of reproduction rationally stabilized, and the produc-
tion of space made to serve human needs. Rather, the consolidation of a
global dynamic of production and of a given form of the production of

space is portrayed as ultimately meaningless in its aims, as beyond value,
and as always undermining its own possibility for existence. Bolaño’s atti-
tude toward capitalist globalization, as evident in his treatment of the
urban qua image, evokes the avant-garde’s discovery of a silent universe
of technological precision dominated by the laws of production. Bolaño,
however, parts ways with the modernist avant-garde in that a higher syn-
thesis is not seen by the Chilean as attainable. Bolaño sees globalization
as ultimately tending to disorder, chaos, and destruction. The ruins of
a post-apocalyptic urban space are more integral to Bolaño’s imaginary
than are the avant-garde’s urban utopias.
It is time to measure the distance between those urban utopias and
Bolaño’s urban dystopias. Bolaño’s oppositional perspective, manufac-
tured from a Latin American positionality but global in scope, is artic-
ulated in his depiction of marginalized publics that continuously spawn
outside of the confines of controlled loci of cultural, social or economic
production. This chaotic proliferation of publics signals the chaos that
undermines all forms of order, including the grandest vision of order of
all, the project of global rationalization (of space and time) that forms
the utopian end-point of much of the discourse on modernity. It should
also be noted that “The Coronel’s Son” inverts the relation between
underground and surface as portrayed in “The Rat Police.” The under-
ground in “The Coronel’s Son” is the space of labyrinthine tunnels and
zombies from which there escape a young couple dedicated not to mind-
less production but to a form of sublime experience: love. Love, an affect
or activity perhaps akin to art in the bourgeois imaginary. Love, however,
is understood in Bolaño as an illusory escape from a meaningless world
permeated by evil. Love is equivalent to the sublime uselessness of art.
Neither leaves space for an ethical stance which can sustain a direct look
into the abyss, to borrow one of Bolaño’s favorite figures. This, then,
elucidates the paradoxical role of cognitive mapping in Roberto Bolaño’s
work. The ethical stance elaborated by Bolaño, and represented most
clearly by Pepe, is one characterized by sustained engagement with “the
abyss.” The image of the city as Aleph for the global is ultimately the
figure of a silent universe of technical precision that can only resolve itself
in urban ruin. When faced by the silence of this image, the only ethical
alternative to madness and evil is the sustained heroic gaze, a gaze freed
of the illusions of sublime art/love, a gaze that seeks to take hold of the
urban/global totality in one image, if only to gage its position.
192 J. P. MELO
Bibliography
Adorno, T. W. and Max Horkheimer. 2002. Dialectic of Enlightenment:
Philosophical Fragments. Edited by Gunzelin Schmid Noerr. Translated by
Edmund Jephcott. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Andrews, Chris. 2014. Roberto Bolaño’s Fiction: An Expanding Universe. New
York: Columbia University Press.
Bolaño, Roberto. 2003. “El policía de las ratas.” In El gaucho insufrible, 53–86.
Barcelona: Editorial Anagrama.
———. 2007. “El hijo del coronel”. In El secreto del mal, edited by Ignacio
Echevarría, 31–48. Barcelona: Editorial Anagrama.
Hansen, Miriam Bratu. 2012. Cinema and Experience: Siegfriend Kracauer,
Walter Benjamin, and Theodor W. Adorno. Berkeley: University of California
Press.
Hoyos, Héctor. 2015. Beyond Bolaño: The Global Latin American Novel. New
York: Columbia University Press.
Kafka, Franz. 1971. “Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk.” In The Complete
Stories, edited by Nahum N. Glatzer, 360–378. New York: Schocken Books.
Negt, Oskar and Alexander Kluge. 2016. Public Sphere and Experience: Analysis
of the Bourgeois and Proletarian Public Sphere. Translated by Peter Labanyi,
Jamie Owen Daniel, and Assenka Oksiloff. London: Verso.
Saucedo Lastra, Fernando. 2015. México en la obra de Roberto Bolaño: Memoria y
territorio. Madrid: Iberoamericana.
Tafuri, Manfredo. 1976. Architecture and Utopia: Design and Capitalist
Development. Translated by Barbara Luigia La Penta. Cambridge: MIT Press.
CHAPTER 10
The Tourist Aesthetic and Empire

in Rodrigo Fresán’s Mantra
and Jardines de Kensington
Timothy R. Robbins
With his imaginative yet complex fragmented narrative, Rodrigo Fresán

is a prime example of the cosmopolitan international Latin American
author. Following the path of many Latin American literary stars, the
Argentine native found it necessary to leave his country of origin for
the literary center of Barcelona, where he currently resides. Eduardo
Bercerra has described Fresán as “unquestionably representative of
Spanish-American narrative at the end of the twentieth and start of the
twenty-first centuries” (2013, p. 339). Fresán’s texts continue the tra-
dition of Borges, through his whimsical approach to his subject matter
and his desire to reach beyond the physical geographical boundaries of
his birth country. Like Borges, Fresán chooses to describe, and even
invent new localities, and he is also intimately invested in the urban expe-
rience of these spaces. In many ways, Fresán and his literary production
provide a glimpse into the literary market—Fresán is uniquely posi-
tioned to explore the nature and autonomy of Latin American literature.
T. R. Robbins (*) 
Drury University, Springfield, MO, USA

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-92438-0_10
194 T. R. ROBBINS
He chooses to place his narratives in real spaces, but ones that are dis-
tanced from a national context and in some cases even a Latin American
one. I will argue that Fresán creates a tourist aesthetic within his works
that produces a juxtaposition between the tourist Self and the culture of
the tourist site as Other. In Mantra (2001) and Jardines de Kensington
(2003), Fresán uses the position of the tourist with its inherent dynamic
of Self and Other to explore the nature of the author in contemporary
Latin American literature—and does so through an explicitly urban
context.
Before turning to Fresán’s fiction, it is useful to consider what at first
seems a simple concept, that of the tourist. The idea of the modern tour-
ist is as complicated, nuanced and even charged as any other critical idea.
A relatively new phenomenon, international tourism was made available
by the growth of capitalism and the rise of the middle class combined
with advances in technology that allow for more rapid travel. At the root
of the tourist experience, especially for the international tourist, is the
idea of leisure and travel. The tourist has the economic freedom to travel
outside his or her own sphere to engage in other experiences (or, to put
it another way, in experiences of the Other). In fact, the idea of the tour-
ist can be, somewhat simplistically, reduced to that of the individual and
his or her desire to confront the Other. Sociologist Erik Cohen defines
the tourist as, “a voluntary, temporary traveler, travelling in the expecta-
tion of pleasure from the novelty and change experienced on a relatively
long and non-recurrent round-trip” (2004, p. 23). For many theorists,
tourism is seen as an attempt to escape from modern society. Hans
Enzenberg (1996) argues that tourism is a way of escaping the modern
world, but at the same time it contains the paradox of the very thing
from which the tourist seeks to escape.1
As an escape from modern largely urban society, tourism is also preoc-
cupied with the idea of experience. The tourist seeks the experience of a
premodern utopian naturalism or the experience of the Other, all with-
out leaving completely the safe confines of one’s comfortable modern
lifestyle. The tourist maintains a delicate balance between the comforts
of his or her own culture and identity with the experience of the Other.
Cohen (2004) nuances this balance by proposing a typology or spectrum
of tourist identity that varies from one who uses a preestablished group
tour, thus maintaining a strong connection to the norms and values of
one’s native culture, to those who shun any semblance of stereotypical
tourist practice in search of an authentic experience.
10 THE TOURIST AESTHETIC AND EMPIRE … 195
In tourist theory, the search for authenticity is equally polemical—

whether the tourist really seeks a completely authentic experience or not
is fodder for debate. What gains general acceptance is that regardless of
the authenticity the tourist finds, the experience is one that is carefully
controlled. Dean MacCannell suggests that tourism seeks authenticity
through ritual. MacCannell argues that,
sightseeing is a ritual performed to the differentiations of society.

Sightseeing is a kind of collective striving for a transcendence of the mod-
ern totality, a way of attempting to overcome the discontinuity of moder-
nity, of incorporating its fragments into unified experience. (1976, p. 13)
Thus, the tourist seeks an escape through the rituals of tourism in a quest
for an authenticity that the individual finds lacking in modern society.2
Furthermore, for MacCannell, “[t]he rhetoric of tourism is full of man-
ifestations of the importance of the authenticity of the relationship
between the tourist and what they see” (1976, p. 14). The experience
gained from the tourist attraction is indelibly tied to an authenticity that
cannot be reproduced.
The tourist can be seen, then, as the traveler who attempts to bridge
the gap between Self and Other while remaining to some extent within
the confines of the safe space of familiarity. This experience of Other var-
ies in depth as well as authenticity. The final aspect to note about the
tourist, then, is the generally negative view that many, including fel-
low travelers, theorists and even citizens of tourist zones, ascribe to
the tourist. In many cases, this is connected to the authenticity of the
experience—the tourist wants to authentically engage in the tourist expe-
rience as if he or she were a part of the culture to which it pertains. To
appear as tourist, in the sense of not belonging, is to rupture the authen-
ticity of the event.
One can identify a set of core concepts related to tourist theory, like
the idea of Self and Other, tourist attraction and guide which connect
Fresán’s novelistic explorations of the city. Fresán utilizes urban space
in his novels Mantra (2001), which takes place in Mexico City, and
Jardines de Kensington (2003), for which London serves as the geo-
graphic focus, as a way to explore the identity of urban space, but he
does so largely through the lens of an outsider looking in. Both nov-
els share an aesthetic that brings them closer to a chronicle or catalog—
an encyclopedic pastiche of images and references that approximates a
196 T. R. ROBBINS
tourist guide. Fresán constructs Mexico City and London through an

intentional listing of famous events, people and locations as a way of con-
necting the experience of reading to the authenticity of the urban zones
he appropriates in the same way that according to MacCannell the tour-
ist seeks to contextualize his or her experience through its authenticity.
While Fresán’s earlier works take global forays, Mantra is his first
novel to explicitly leave the confines of Argentina for the bulk of the
narration.3 The novel forms part of Mondadori’s Año 0 collection in
which seven Latin American writers published novels about global cities.4
While, as Eduardo Becerra (2013) notes, it is difficult to attempt to sum-
marize any of Fresán’s novels given the shifting and fragmented style
combined with myriad interconnecting storylines that are constantly
maintaining narrative tension, Mantra can be described as the points
of intersection between Martin Mantra, Mexico City and three separate
narrators.
J. Andrew Brown describes Mantra as “a series of attempts to under-
stand culture, both Mexican and global, as the conglomeration of popu-
lar discourses and especially television and film” (2010, p. 147). I would
add that Fresán does this through an explicitly tourist centered context.
The French narrator of the second and largest section even frames this
journey through a touristic lens—stating that he is sent to Mexico City
in the first place to write an article about tourism in Mexico City.5 As an
explicit outsider, the narrator frames the novel as his attempt to explore,
describe and experience another world. The Argentine narrator of the
first section shares this desire to experience and describe the unknown,
citing a long-held affinity for Mexico and Mexican culture (Fresán 2001,
p. 38). Thus, the narrators in the novel are positioned as outsiders look-
ing in and negotiating with the local, specifically Mexican culture, to cre-
ate meaning and a form of national identity.
Within Mantra, the tourist experience can be divided into two sep-
arate forms: the experience of place and the experience of being. The
experience of place is crucial for a ritualistic escape from modern life; the
tourist travels to a destination in order to experience the exotic Other.
One of the prime techniques Fresán uses to ground the physical loca-
tions of both novels to their cultural significance is the use of the pal-
impsest. In Mantra the tourist destinations of Mexico City layer the
pre-Colombian with the modern in recognition of the various stages
of development, identity construction and conflict. The narration trav-
els through the Mexico City of pre-Colombian times with its idealized
mythology, through the era of Spanish invasion and conquest to a more

modern tourism, following the experiences of famous authors like the
Beat writers, Malcolm Lowry and Graham Greene in the metropolis.
It layers the past and the present as one, describing Teotihaucán as, “lo
más parecido a una de esas tapas de viejos discos de Pink Floyd” (2001,
p. 183).6 In this syncretism of experience, the novel idealizes the past as
a now unattainable yet somehow permanent key to authenticity. Gustavo
Llarull (2011) argues that Fresán combines traditional “high” culture lit-
erary forms with both technologically driven mass culture as well as tra-
ditional folk or popular culture in a blend of modern and technologically
driven literary forms. Fresán, in other words, provides not just a tempo-
ral palimpsest, but a cultural one in which the Twilight Zone, Mexican
lucha libre, the Beat poets, Apocalypse Now, and Posada’s engravings
coexist. As Edmundo Paz Soldán (2003) has noted, Fresán gives a place
of privilege to non-Mexican and non-Latin American experiences of
Mexico City.7 In other words, Fresán chooses specifically non-native per-
spectives that allow him to explore the city as a tourist.
Dean MacCannell (1976) argues that the authenticity of the tourist
site is complemented by an anxiety regarding the authenticity of mod-
ern life, a reaction that is seen in the novel. The experience gained from
the tourist attraction is indelibly tied to an authenticity that cannot be
reproduced. In Fresan’s text, the narrator describes a trip to the Louvre
in Paris where one finds the “Greatest Hits que al verlos live siempre,
sin excepción parecen más grandes o más pequeños que en los libros,
pero jamás del tamaño en que los imaginábamos” (2001, p. 287).
The authenticity of the tourist experience is also tied to what Walter
Benjamin (2008) calls the “aura,” that is the element of the work that has
a direct and lasting impression upon the spectator. The aura of a work of
art separates it from other forms of production, and the aura validates the
authenticity of a work of art. For Benjamin, the aura—or religious-like
effect one feels when experiencing the authentic work—is lost with the
mechanical reproduction of the work of art. On finding that a treasured
painting is “Gone to Japan” (Fresán 2001, p. 288), the narrator explains
that he had to settle for a mere postcard, a “[p]remio consuelo” (Fresán
2001, p. 288) of the painting that was a lifeless imitation due to its
lack of aura. In order to fully engage in the tourist experience, the site
must combine its authenticity with its aura, even if the significance
of the site is artificially constructed. The irony here is that while accord-
ing to Benjamin, the mechanical reproduction of art destroys its aura,
198 T. R. ROBBINS
the tourist industry exemplifies the massification of the experience of

authenticity.
In contrast to the authenticity of place which is many times related to
the premodern, the tourist also experiences a grounding in postmodern
cultural homogeneity in what Marc Augé (1995) calls non-places. The
non-place is that which has little or no connection with the local and has
no pretensions at conferring meaning. Despite their monotony, the non-
place gives the individual a frame of reference. It allows the tourist to
maintain ties with the comfortable modern world, yet still dwell into the
experiences of the exotic Other for short spans. The narrator in Mantra
explains that, “todos los aeropuertos internacionales son más o menos lo
mismo, supongo: zonas liminares pobladas por sonámbulos cuya función
es la de suspender una vida—las palabras Arrivals y Departures bien
pueden ser los paréntesis que aprisionan a toda historia posible” (2001,
p. 136). The airport as non-place also gives a uniformity of experience
that suspends authentic experience. It is not until after leaving the com-
fort of the known that the tourist can attempt to fully immerse him or
herself in the escape from modern life that tourism gives. Another non-
place is the hotel, which also unifies travel experience into a safe, predi-
cable bundle. As Cohen argues, “[t]hough novelty and strangeness are
essential elements in the tourist experience, not even modern man is
completely ready to immerse himself wholly in an alien environment…
Most tourists seem to need something familiar around them” (2004,
p. 38). The hotel functions as an escape from the Other into familiarity.
For the same reason, it is also impossible to write authentic literature in a
hotel according to the narrator:
Prosa room-service y aire acondicionado: tus palabras ya no son tus pal-

abras, podrían ser las de cualquiera de los otros que han dormido en esa
cama o cagado en ese baño o vaciado una botellita de ese refrigerador
enano o garabateado algo en esas postales gratis con el membrete del hotel
y la foto de un edificio alto parecido a tantos otros edificios altos e hijos
bastardos de un mismo padre. (2001, p. 305)
The experience of the non-place at the same time provides safety, but
also excludes true experience. For this reason, the manager of the hotel
El Universo repeatedly claims the distinction of being the place where
Apocalypse Now was filmed, in this way fusing the safety of the non-place
with the authenticity of the tourist site. The exclusion of experience
inherent in the non-place drives the narrator’s statement that, while on

the one hand “los aeropuertos ya son viejos apenas cincuenta minutos
después de haber sido inaugurados” on the other hand, “los museos
parecen, también paradójicamente, […] mantenerse mucho mejor y más
frescos” (2001, p. 153). In this way, the premodern in Mantra is tied to
its authenticity and thus maintains its permanence when the non-places
will degrade into oblivion. Just as the museum as the site of authenticity
appears cleaner and better kept than the airport, “[l]as ruinas arquelógi-
cas en el D.F. y en los alrededores del D.F. parecen, misteriosamente,
más nuevas y en mejor estado que muchas de las construcciones moder-
nas” (2001, p. 181). The specific character of the idealized premodern
gives the ruins as tourist site a freshness that the postmodern character of
the non-place cannot.
It is this same fusion of familiarity preserved in the non-place with the
desire to explore the unknown and escape the confines of commonplace
modern life that characterizes the quintessential metaphor of the tour-
ist: the guidebook. Combined with the map, the guidebook provides a
bridge between the non-place and the tourist attraction, which, in fact, is
what the tourist seeks. In Mantra, the narrator describes the guidebook
as similar to the International Language of the Dead, which consists of
“[f]rases cortas. Manía referencial. Memoria selecta. Palabras que dijeron
otros para que después les repita uno” (2001, p. 332). Dean MacCannell
(1976) explains that the tourist attraction consists of a relationship
between the tourist, the site and the marker. The marker, in this case the
guidebook, gives the site significance (or interprets it) as well as performs
a ritualistic function. In serving as a filter between the uninitiated tourist
and the ritual site, the guidebook offers an interpretation of the place
based on select memory and repetition of experience.
It is only by distancing oneself from the non-place, through the
map or guidebook that the reader can get an idea of the Mexico City
described in Mantra. The narrator reflects on the nature of his map of
Mexico City, stating,
Ciudad de México desde arriba, en esos cielos precisos desde los que se
trazan los mapas, parece más un país o continente. Un mapa que esconde
otro mapa que es el mapa del lago fantasma de Texcoco y que si se lo
invoca en mapas del siglo XV descubrimos que tiene la forma reconocible
de un feto humano flotando dentro de una bolsa de líquido amniótico con
200 T. R. ROBBINS
el punto donde estaba Tenochtitlán y hoy está el Zócalo en el sitio exacto

del ombligo. (2001, p. 246)
The map of Mexico City returns to the palimpsest containing the mod-
ern megapolis layered above its pre-Colombian origins.8 Through the
ritual involved in the guidebook or map, the tourist can also attempt
to bridge the gap between non-place and tourist location; exploring
the Other from the safe confines of one’s own homogenous postmod-
ern framework. The narrator observes this by stating, “[d]esplegamos
mapas demasiado grandes en calles donde la gente camina apretada como
frijoles. Marcamos un punto, una x, un círculo. El sitio adonde llegar.
La cuestión es claro, en dónde estamos, dónde quedamos. Buena pre-
gunta. ¿Dónde queda algo en Ciudad de México?” (2001, pp. 257–258).
The need to experience the tourist site is combined with the uncertainty
of the unfamiliar. This is the space the guidebook attempts to combat,
bringing the familiar into the exotic unknown.
Concurrent with exploring the tourist’s desire for immersion in the
authentic premodern, the novel nevertheless maintains a strictly negative
image of the tourist—Fresán uses the metaphor of illness to explain the
connotation of the tourist as inauthentic and damaging. The combina-
tion of the tourist and illness found in Mantra is paralleled in Gerhard
Nebel’s early critique of tourism when he describes “[t]he swarms of
these gigantic bacteria, called tourists, [who] have coated the most dis-
tinct substances with a uniformly glistening Thomas-Cook slime, mak-
ing it impossible to distinguish Cairo from Honolulu, Taormina from
Colombo” (qtd. in Enszensberger 1996, p. 120). While the tourist
seeks, and sometimes appreciates the primitive sublime, his or her pres-
ence also mars the relative value of the experience. The authenticity of,
for example, pre-Colombian architectural ruins is diminished when the
experience is populated by the teeming masses and the tourist is una-
ble to see it in its pristine, sacred and natural form. The novel sums up
the cohabitation of tourism and illness through the phantom of the pre-
Colombian primitive sublime that confronts the modern world. In a con-
tinuum of famous tourists to Mexico City, the text manifests this illness
through:
[l]a Venganza de Moctezuma [que] está hecha con partes iguales

de Visiones de Dylan, Síndrome de Karloff, Furia de Peckinpah,
Catastrofismo de Posada, Cut-up de Burroughs, Jaqueca de Trotsky,
Cubo de Cortázar, Surrealismo de Breton, Fotograma de Eisenstein,

Kyrie Eleison de Kerouac, Humor de Huxley, Siesta de Serling, Libris de
Lowry, Espalda de Kahlo, Miedo de Buñuel, Vómito de Vollmer, Peyote
de Artaud, Náusea de Gainsbourg …”. (2001, p. 476)
The corrosive effect of the tourist, seen through the metaphor of sick-
ness is perhaps best demonstrated through the recurring image of Hans,
the German tourist. At one point, the text describes Hans vomiting on a
statue of Chacmool (Fresán 2001, p. 182). This passage highlights the
attitude taken both by the tourist and toward the tourist in the novel.
On one hand, the tourist shows an apparent disdain toward the culture
being consumed, as a product like any other that can be defiled with base
human waste material. On the other hand, the culture exacerbates the
flaws that the tourist demonstrates. In another passage, Hans faints after
consuming spicy food. The tourist is one who claims the experience, but
in many ways cannot fully embrace it. The process of tourism maintains
a clear separation between the individual and the other, never allowing
the individual to fully understand the other and thus maintaining a strict
division of experience. Thus, the tourist is portrayed as the invader or
the blight which comes from beyond the boundaries in order to mar the
primitive perfection of the tourist site. Through the focus of tourism, the
tourist site has diminished value without the ability to be seen and par-
adoxically the proliferation of tourists also diminishes the experience by
eliminating the primitive nature of the place.
An important aspect of tourism, according to Dennis Merrill (2009),
is the soft power of the tourist which enables the establishment of
empire. Merrill explains that the hegemonic process involved directly
with tourism is a cultural conversation in which the tourist is only
one of a number of factors that enable empire to occur.9 The tourist,
then, can be seen as an enabler of empire, so it is no surprise that the
primary description of the tourist in Mantra is that of the invader. The
guidebook, or the map, allows the invader to plan the conquest of the
other. Early in the novel, the narrator exclaims, “[s]iempre me fascinó
esa pasión turística de los monstruos gigantes” (2001, p. 88), mention-
ing Godzilla as a specific example. The text goes on to cite a number
of invaders to Mexico City, with all the accompanying negative connota-
tions. From the conquistadores, most notably Hernán Cortés, the narra-
tion passes to the more contemporary Beat poets who spent, “[t]odo el
tiempo revolviendo en cajones ajenos, llevándose la ropa colgada de las
202 T. R. ROBBINS
sogas en los patios traseros, drogándose para que todo les pareciera una
iluminación” (2001, p. 232). The image of the Beat poets, as symbols
of drug tourism, is especially poignant given the effects of drug tourism
on Mexico. After R. Gordon Wasson’s 1957 article in Time magazine
which described his trips to Mexico to experience the effects of hallu-
cinogenic mushrooms, hippies from the United States flocked to Mexico
in order to “experience” the primitive sublime of consciousness-altering
substances at the “authentic” site of pre-Colombian culture. At the same
time, the drug tourism of the 60s and 70s had a degenerating effect on
Mexico, introducing the drug subculture into Mexico City.10 The novel,
through the metaphor of invader, highlights the ways in which the tour-
ist acts as a mediator of the dominant culture of empire through his/her
soft power.
Thus, Mantra reveals a negative definition of the tourist as one who
neither fully understands the idealized primitive sublime of the pre-
Colombian world and who also infects this very space with the con-
queror’s mentality. Above all, the novel critiques the shifting landscape
of signification in postmodern society at the same time that it actively
participates in the cultural milieu of pastiche and pluralism. In the end,
the narration advocates for a futuristic return to the primitive by creat-
ing a new science fiction mythology based on a fusion of primitivism and
postmodern society with the technological advances that accompany it.11
The focus on tourism in the novel becomes another arena in which the
interplay between the ideal primitive and modern society plays out, and
in which the fiction of the primitive ultimately gains the upper hand, rel-
egating the tourist to an object of revulsion and contempt.
While the tourist is seen as unwanted invader in Mantra, the tour-
ist aspects of Jardines de Kensington focus on the flip side of empire.12
The novel balances recognition of the extent of empire (in this case the
British Empire) with a marked nostalgia as this empire crumbles into
decline. The novel explicitly complicates the place of Great Britain as
world power by the fact that the novel vacillates temporally between the
empire at the height of its power at the turn of the twentieth century
and an empire in its moment of decline in the 1960s. London, as the
seat of empire, plays a crucial role in the description the novel offers of
the metropolis. A curious example of this nostalgia comes in the form of
the narrator’s parents—famous rock stars who advocate a very conserv-
ative and monarchic response to the antiestablishment counterculture
of the 60s. Even the initial name of the band, The Beaten Victorians,
alludes to the values and culture of Barrie’s London, where, “Victoria

era Inglaterra… Victoria era también la Pax Británnica, la Tregua Divina,
la Espada en Alto que nunca necesitó asestar el golpe” (Fresán 2008,
p. 219). The Beaten Victorians see themselves as the conservative and
monarchic alternative to the Beatles—a sort of counter-counterculture—
in other words a counterculture that celebrates empire rather than tries
to combat it.
The novel explicitly connects the stages of empire with that of nar-
rative forms through the metaphor of youth. Since the majority of the
novel retells the life of J. M. Barrie, it of necessity dwells on the idea
of youth as best exemplified by the boy who refused to grow up, Peter
Pan. The novel also directly ties youth to the height of empire, stating,
“La idea de la infancia se construye en la Inglaterra Victoriana” (2003,
p. 244). The crucial factor in the treatment of youth in the novel, how-
ever, is the fact that it is seen through the lens of retrospection and
nostalgia. Peter Pan as a fictitious character presents Barrie’s profound
nostalgia for the past, just as Sebastian “Darjeeling” Compton-Lowe’s
nostalgia for a Victorian age that he never experienced finds its origins in
a nonspecific and even fictitious past where Britain was one of the most
important players on the world stage. At the heart of this nostalgia, how-
ever, lies the trauma of change. The narrator writes that, “Si la literatura
adulta es, por lo general, producto de un trauma infantil escondido,
entonces la literatura infantil es producto de un trauma infantil perfecta-
mente visible” (2003, p. 249). The trauma of youth in this novel, and
in J. M. Barrie’s magnum opus, is that of leaving childhood for adult-
hood—and the trauma of youthful empire is the knowledge that empire
grows, matures and eventually decays.
The maturation of empire in the novel coincides with its moments of
decline and the trauma of the two world wars. The novel places prime
importance on the effects of both world wars for the identity of the
nation. The narrator describes:
Abuelos y tíos petrificados en el ámbar de una o dos guerras, deprimidos

por la decadencia lenta pero constante del Imperio, recordando con tris-
teza el discurso de abdicación amorosa de Edward VIII aquel fatídico 11
de diciembre de 1936, cuando todo terminó de estropearse, preguntán-
dose qué es lo que había ocurrido, cómo era posible que el 40% de la
población de Londres tuviera ahora menos de veinticinco años de edad y
seguro que esto tenía que ver con el vertiginoso aumento de los índices de
204 T. R. ROBBINS
criminalidad, adónde se habían ido los buenos tiempos, y alguien ha oído

algo nuevo sobre la salud de Winston, ¿eh? (2003, p. 179)
In many ways, this passage imitates the novel’s approach to both world
history and that of the British Empire. It starts by emphasizing the rela-
tionship of family elders—who are in a position to retrospectively look at
the past and which also gives a sense of intimacy in exploring large histor-
ical trends. These family elders note the decline of morals in a concrete
political way through the crisis of the monarchy due to Edward VIII’s
relationship with divorcee Wallis Simpson as well through imagined gen-
eralizations—the increasing lawlessness of the city. Added to the moral
decline, the passage recognizes the demographic realities of a country
that has fought two brutal and devastating world wars in two successive
generations. In the end, what remains is the nostalgia for previous times
and the final glimpse of hope placed on the aging hero of the past.
The pervasive reflection on nostalgia for empire and the past juxta-
posed with an explicit recognition of decline and change also finds a
parallel in the very geography of the novel—physical location plays
a supremely important role in Jardines de Kensington as it does with
Mantra. In keeping with the style of Mantra, in which the narrator
acts as chronicler or compiler, Jardines de Kensington reads almost like
a simple biography interspersed with reference book. As chronicler, the
narrator gives painstaking attention to place and time throughout the
narration. For instance, in talking about the death of Barrie’s brother,
the narrator locates it, “junto a las colinas de Grampian, en las afueras
de Kirreimuir, en el condado de Angus, alguna vez conocido como
Forfarshire, a cinco millas al noroeste de Forfar, en Escocia, en aquel
terrible e inolvidable enero de 1867” (2003, p. 26). The narrator’s fas-
tidious nature as chronicler forces him to insist upon giving the address
of the various residences in the novel whenever they are mentioned.
This attention to detail is not limited to geographic space, however, but
extends to temporal space as well. His fixation on place and time is best
exemplified in the suicidal last thoughts of one of Barrie’s sources of
inspiration for Peter Pan: “Peter Llewelyn Davies piensa en que el 5 de
abril de 1960, en que no hay tiempo, en que ya es la hora, en qué hora
es, en que aquí llega el metro a la estación Sloane Square puntual como
siempre …” (2003, p. 23). Like the tourist, who feels the need to mark
the experience in place and time, the narrator of Jardines de Kensington
perpetually keeps these markers at the forefront of the narration.
How, then, does this attention to detail translate to the experience of

the urban through the image of London portrayed in the novel? First
and foremost, the novel expresses the ever-changing nature of the urban
space. He describes an image of Barrie on entering London pondering
“el origen misterioso y el eco de todas las letras posibles a la hora de
enterrar la piedra fundamental y la firma de una ciudad que comienza
a crecer ya a finales del neolítico: Kaerlud, Kaerlundein, Lyn-don,
Laindon, Lunnd, Caer Luud, lundunes, Lindonion, Londinium, Lundene,
Lundone, Ludenberk, Longidinium, Babylondon” (2003, p. 75). Just as
Fresán insists upon the temporal and cultural layers of Mexico City in
Mantra, he underscores both the antiquity and constancy of London
in Jardines de Kensington. At the same time, this passage alludes to the
changes that come with the presence of time, as ancient barely recogniz-
able names give way to more familiar approximations. This recognition
of sameness and change does not limit itself to the level of the city, filter-
ing down to neighborhoods and even individual streets. Thus, the novel
describes J. M. Barrie passing through a city in which, “los nombres son
los mismos. Los nombres serán siempre los mismos por más que el con-
tenido y el humor adentro del envase de esos nombres cambie de sabor
y de perfume. Nombres londinenses de Londres: King’s Road, Chelsea,
Bond Street, East Ham High Street, Primrose Hill y Carnaby Street …”
(2003, p. 78). Immediately following this statement, the text emphasizes
this point by exploring the history of the various iterations of Carnaby
Street.
Indeed, the text explicitly imagines London as a series of superim-
posed maps in which previous layers peek through the modern and in
which “lo público intersecta lo privado” (2003, p. 78), in much the
same way that Mantra envisions Mexico City as a palimpsest of cultures
and time periods. This layering of London, like the geological layers of
earth that the archeologist would uncover in order to gain an under-
standing of London through time, is capped with the recognition of
London’s importance not just as a city, but as the center of a culture:
“La ciudad más grande del mundo. El núcleo del Imperio. La urbe capaz
de soportar colosales invasiones, grandes incendios y enormes pestes”
(2003, p. 75). As timeless geographical space (evidenced by the various
denominations of the city), London withstands the traumas of the past—
surviving but not necessarily forgetting them. Furthermore, London,
as both political and cultural center, extends its reach to the corners of
the globe, and in turn, is influenced by the empire it rules. The narrator
206 T. R. ROBBINS
describes a different London, in which one character is described as

“parte de ese caldo condimentado con especias picantes y coloniales—
Caribe, África, India, China, Nueva Zelanda y Australia—que comenzó a
cocerse con furia y fuego en el Londres de la posguerra” (2003, p. 238).
London becomes the physical space where the various cultures of the
empire meet and negotiate.
Just as the novel describes London as the center of the universe, at
the center of London—and of the novel itself—lies Kensington Gardens.
The narrator affirms that, “a la hora de proponer un posible corazón
del universo—ese punto de energía pura del que todo surgió y al que
todo acabará volviendo—permíteme desplegar ante tus ojos, Keiko Kai,
un mapa del metropolis sagrada de Londres y señalarte el sitio exacto
donde crece la felicidad esmeralda de Kensington Gardens” (2003,
p. 133).13 Given that the bulk of the novel consists of a biography of
J. M. Barrie, it is no coincidence that the park gives its name to the title
of the novel. One of the dominant themes of the novel is that of youth
and of aging, a logical topic given the importance of Peter Pan to the
biography of Barrie and to the novel itself. However, the election of a
physical place as the title of the novel alludes to the importance of loca-
tion and space for the vision the novel celebrates. Kensington Gardens,
as a symbol of eternal youth incarnated in Peter Pan, perpetuates the
constancy of London—just as London will always be there, so will the
ideals of permanent youth as symbol of empire. Beyond the simple con-
flation of Kensington Gardens, and thus of London as center of empire,
with youth, and thus the apogee of empire in the Victorian age, the
novel furthers this equation by explicitly tying literary production to
the construction of place. It is only through literature that Kensington
Gardens finds its place among the pantheon of London’s cultural spaces.
The text suggests the power of literature to transform not just the imag-
ination, but also to affect the significations of the physical world in
describing Barrie in Kensington Gardens before he becomes famous:
“Aún no hay estatua de Peter Pan junto a The Serpentine porque no
hay Peter Pan; no hay guías turísticas que indiquen cómo llegar aquí, en
qué estación de metro bajarse, o que necesiten de todo un capítulo para
delimitar y ubicar en el mapa los puntos a recorrer del Barrie’s London”
(2003, p. 122).14 Barrie metaphorically rejuvenates Kensington Gardens
through the power of his artistic production.
While London as geographical space is portrayed as a constant, it also
exhibits the changes of time—imitating in its own way the life cycles
of humanity and of empire that the novel describes. Paradoxically, the

constancy of time and space is precisely its changeable nature. While the
majority of the novel dwells in the world of J. M. Barrie at the turn of
the twentieth century, the narrator draws parallels between the end of
the Victorian era and his own childhood in the 1960s. Thus, the nar-
rator describes a revitalization of London as center following its loss of
prestige after World War Two, this time as the center of a cultural or
more precisely countercultural movement. The narrator states that
“[r]esucitamos a una ciudad que estaba en coma, la convertimos en el
centro de todas las cosas por unos años. New York, París, Los Ángeles
miraban a Londres para mirarnos a nosotros” (2003, p. 140).15 The
counterculture lifts London out of its state of insignificance, which the
narrator compares to a coma-like state. The experience of the counter-
culture is grounded in two complementary foci—that of countercultural
movements and that of popular culture. Jardines de Kensington brings
the same impeccable attention to detail, especially to location and time,
to the presentation of the counterculture. In presenting a typology of
counterculture London, the novel conflates musical taste and drug pref-
erence with countercultural group: “El duelo entre las anfetaminas y el
ácido lisérgico es la primera gran lucha química, la primera grieta en la
hasta entonces inmaculada porcelana: Rockers versus Mods” (2003,
p. 222). The equation of the stereotypical countercultural drugs and
music finds a further connection with the very geography of London—
the narrator’s need to catalog events and even individuals fixing them in
both space and time places the first great conflict between rockers and
mods at Clacton-on-the-Sea, Essex March 26–27, 1964 (2003, p. 225).
Objectively classifying the nature of the counterculture compels the nar-
rator to contextualize the experience as well. After mentioning their pre-
cursors, the Teddy Boys, the novel explains in an almost encyclopedic
way that:
Los Mods, que son la versión sintetizada de los Moderns (que en un

principio sólo oían el jazz más cool y discutían con los Trads, quienes
defendían el dixieland y el ragtime y el skiffle y los blues) y de los
Modernists (adoradores de Jean-Paul Sartre). Ahora se han mezclado y
convertido en dandies surgidos de la periferia de Londres—Tottenham,
Ilford, Stamford Hill—y se proponen reclamar para ellos las zonas más
exclusivas de la ciudad luego de expulsar a todos esos imbéciles y brutos
Rockers. (2003, p. 223)
208 T. R. ROBBINS
The novel follows this up by tracing the geographic mobility of the

Mods, who move to the West and South of London in 1964.
If the inclusion of Mods and Rockers—albeit a minor part of the
novel—shows how Fresán utilizes the geography of London as a mani-
festation of the cultural trends and changes of specifically British culture
in the twentieth century, the inclusion of popular culture references also
serves to contextualize cultural trends as they relate to London specifi-
cally and Western culture more generally. The Beaten Victorians manifest
the points of contact between the nostalgia for the past and the recogni-
tion of change that is ever present in the novel.
The description of Sebastian “Darjeeling” Compton-Lowe’s parties
reads like a who’s who of pop culture in the 1960s in which artists, musi-
cians, philosophers and others mingle.16 In this sense, the nostalgia that
the narrator’s father, Sebastian “Darjeeling” Compton-Lowe, expresses
for a past imperial glory functions in many ways as a publicity stunt,
despite his deeply passionate belief in the past. The position the Beaten
hold with pop media exposes the juxtaposition of nostalgia with coun-
tercultural pop status for the band. The narrator tells of finding a retro-
spective article in an edition of a pop magazine dedicated to cult heroes.
In this article, the impact of the band is reduced to four short sections:
the band, the music, where are they now and trivia. The narrator con-
templates the retrospective look at the 60s through his reflections of the
portrayal of his father in the magazine:
Mi padre no fue un héroe; y si hay algo más terrible que no ser un héroe,
ese algo es querer ser un héroe y no conseguirlo. Aunque tal vez el
heroísmo de [mis padres]… no pasa por lo que quisieron hacer sino por lo
que acabaron siendo. Él y Ella como las más perfectas y mejor consumadas
obras de sí mismos: una épica del fracaso condenada desde el vamos por el
dictum y el slogan de una década que obligaba a cambiar absolutamente
todo para recién entonces poder ser verdaderamente revolucionarios y des-
cubrir, al final, el no haberse convertido en otra cosa que en niños con-
fundidos con pedazos irreconocibles de juguetes supuestamente inmorales.
(2003, p. 103)
This extensive quote gets to the heart of the band’s position regarding
the 60s, the narrator’s childhood and the nature of culture and coun-
terculture. The band itself becomes a symbol of nostalgia only because
of its futile dedication to the idea itself as a way to hold back the tides of
change, an effort which in the end fails. The Beaten become the quixotic
symbol of the noble martyr.
While Jardines de Kensington is certainly less implicitly connected to
the tourist, devoid of the direct observations and reflections found in
Mantra, the tourist ethos can still be seen throughout the novel. An
essential part of the compilation nature of the novel includes the need
for academic referentiality. The narrator makes use of numerous bio-
graphical texts in order to represent the life and times of J. M. Barrie.17
Furthermore, in his lengthy reflections at the end of the novel, Fresán
offers an extensive list of sources which he used in order to construct the
novel.
The most enlightening section, however, is Fresán’s assertion that,
“no puedo decir que conozco a Londres,. Estuve allí un par de días,
hace muchos años, en los que apenas salí de un hotel de las afueras de
la ciudad … En resumen: nunca estuve en Kensington Gardens. Sin
embargo, conozco muy bien Heathrow” (2003, p. 462). While many
would and have used the lack of direct knowledge as ammunition to crit-
icize Fresán—how could he dare write a novel not only devoid of a Latin
American context but for which he has no direct personal experience
of?—the fact that Fresán’s understanding of the London he writes about
depends intimately on his own studies does raise some interesting points
about the nature of literature in general and that of Latin American liter-
ature more specifically.
Fresán’s aesthetic finds a direct antecedent in the works of Latin
American literary icon Jorge Luis Borges. Fresán in many ways imitates
the narrative of Borges.18 He creates a double vision of the metropolis.
On one hand, he forges a version of London that has its basis in real-
ity. Barrie’s London comes complete with references, facts, dates and
details—all of which Fresán collects through his own research and which
he alludes to in the author’s notes. On the other, he creates an apoc-
ryphal vision of London through the narrator’s life and works, but this
version is equally based in created texts and pseudo-academic citations.
Beyond the stylistic similarities, Fresán connects with Borges in his vision
of Latin American literature. In his famous essay, “The Argentine Writer
and Tradition,” Borges defends the use of foreign locales as a part of spe-
cifically national literature. For him, the Argentine literary tradition is
firmly grounded in that of the West—he argues that, “nuestra tradición
es toda la cultura occidental, y creo también que tenemos derecho a esta
210 T. R. ROBBINS
tradición, mayor que el que pueden tener los habitantes de una u otra
nación occiendental” (1974, p. 272).19 Within this more cosmopolitan
tradition, Argentine literary tradition is one that can encompass gauchos
alongside the streets of Paris, the tango alongside the British pub. In the
spirit of Borges, Fresán also explicitly connects Argentine literature with
a lack of specifically Argentine themes. Fresán calls upon Borges’s essay
in defending his novel Jardines de Kensington, which he calls “uno de los
libros más argentinos que yo jamás he escrito, más argentino incluso que
Historia argentina y Esperanto que son para mí, apenas, ‘asquerosamente
argentinos,’ lo que no es lo mismo” (2012, p. 355). At the same time, as
Emilse Hidalgo (2014) points out, Fresán takes great pains in his inter-
views to distance himself from magical realism—a literary style that never
had a strong tradition in Argentina. Thus, Fresán is positioning himself
as a cosmopolitan writer not only within the Argentine, but more impor-
tantly within Latin American literary history.
In this sense, the literary vision of Borges and of Fresán complements
the groundbreaking study of Pascale Casanova, who envisions the pub-
lishing industry and the circulation of ideas and of artistic expression as
a market system. In this system, Casanova identifies literary centers—
for much of the nineteenth century Paris, but later London, New York
and Barcelona, this last especially for Latin American authors. Casanova
argues that, with few exceptions, writers seek to enter what he dubs
the world republic of letters, and recognizes the importance of trans-
lation into the “literary” languages of the republic—French and later
English—for legitimacy.20 At the same time, she recognizes the nec-
essary grounding in a literary tradition that is both within the nation
but looking outward: “National literary and linguistic patrimony sup-
plies a sort of a priori definition of the writer, one that he will transform
throughout his career. In other words, the writer stands in a particular
relation to the world literary space by virtue of the place occupied in it
by the national space into which he has been born” (2004, p. 41). Thus,
for legitimacy in the world republic of letters, the writer must take his
or her position of birth and transform it, through both direct linguistic
translation as well as cultural and aesthetic translation, in order to merit
a space in international literary circles. This speaks to the fact that many
Latin American writers like Roberto Bolaño, Patricio Pron, Santiago
Gamboa, and Fresán moved to Europe in order to further their literary
careers.21
This system, of grounding in a national background and identity yet

perpetually transforming to account for international taste brings us back
to the ideal of tourism, and of empire. Fresán, as an author, metaphori-
cally plays the game of literary tourist—accessing the global literary back-
ground which is predominantly European and appropriating these in the
creation of the writer Fresán. For this reason, Fresán tends to cite North
American or European authors as influences instead of, or alongside the
canonical Latin American literary figures, yet he is also stuck in the posi-
tion of outsider given his country of origin, hence the frequent com-
ments in both academic and nonacademic sources that Fresán’s fiction
deviate from context of traditional Latin American literature.
Notes
1. In exploring the contradictions entailed in an escape from crowded urban
society into tightly packed tourist resorts, Enzensberger states that, “the
yearning for freedom from society has been harnessed by the very society
it seeks to escape” (1996, p. 129). The tourist leaves the hustle and bus-
tle of modern society for the same hustle and bustle of the tourist site.
2. The concept of ritual in tourism is another area in tourist theory that is
debatable. Mexican poet and essayist Octavio Paz, for instance, in writ-
ing about the highly ritualistic culture of the Mexican fiesta argues that
“la Fiesta niega a la sociedad en tanto que conjunto orgánico de formas
y principios diferenciados, pero la afirma en cuanto fuente de energía y
creación. Es una verdadera recreación al contrario de lo que ocurre con
las vacaciones modernas que no entrañan rito o ceremonia alguna, indi-
viduales y estériles como el mundo que las ha inventado” (2000, p. 187).
For Paz, the fiesta is a fount of ritual based on the communal experience
it involves while modern tourism or vacation is devoid of the communal
aspect and thus is a hollow approximation. For his part, Néstor García
Canclini explores the tensions between popular fiesta and tourism. He
argues that in an age in which traditional practices are transmitted via the
culture industry, communities make use of this vision through the tour-
ist trade to benefit economically from it. García Canclini states that, “por
causas económicas, políticas o ideológicas la cultura dominante preserva
bolsones arcaicos refuncionalizándolos y recontextualizándolos” (1982,
p. 51). Ironically, the mass culture vision of these traditional festivals and
the communities that embrace such a vision for their economic gain help
preserve the traditional practices that seem to be in danger due to the
foreign, capitalist invasion. The problem for García Canclini lies in how
212 T. R. ROBBINS
far they allow themselves to be dominated as an object of interest for the

tourist.
3. While Mantra is Fresáns first novel to explicitly occur outside of
Argentina, his collection of short stories Historias Argentinas (1991) has
episodes which take place in London, and Vida de Santos (1993) uses the
fictional non-descript town of Canciones Tristes as its setting. Mantra also
maintains its connection with Argentina, through the narrator and his
childhood, in a way that Jardines de Kensington does not pretend to do.
4. Ketevan Kupatadze explores the Año 0 series from the viewpoint of mar-
keting and the tradition of travel writing. She argues that, “working
within the stereotypical boundaries of reference, their works as meta-
texts of travel narrative genre frequently expose and censure its premises”
(2012, p. 203).
5. The narrator explains that the text could be, “a) Una lista lo más com-
pleta posible de todos los hombres célebres y mujeres famosas que
alguna vez hayan pasado por esta maldita ciudad. … b) Tal vez una
vital y reventada crónica à la Hunter Thompson … c) Quizá un fino y
psicotrónico análisis sobre el cine de luchadores y fantástico mexicano …
d) O, tal vez, algo sobre … sobre … sobre tantas otras cosas” (2001,
pp. 472–473). In the end, the novel Mantra combines all of these
elements.
6. Dunia Gras articulates very well the importance of the pre-Colombian
references in Mantra as well as the intertextuality with various canoni-
cal authors, like Juan Rulfo, Julio Cortázar and Gabriel García Márquez,
because of “la impresión de que buena parte de la narrativa latinoamer-
icana última dejaba atrás las referencias telúricas o míticas, identificadas
habitualmente con una temática rural” (2006, p. 73).
7. While Paz Soldán is interested more in the use of mass culture in the
novel, he highlights the fact that the voices in Mantra are predominantly
Western, with few to no non-Western experiences.
8. It is a palimpsest that is mirrored in the text, as Kevetan Kupatadze has
noted, as “the text, as an emblematic image of the city, builds a ‘laby-
rinth’ of (in)coherent associations that intersect continuously and are
impossible to be ordered rationally” (2012, p. 213). Edmundo Paz
Soldán, for his part, has described Mantra as a novel that follows an aes-
thetic of information multiplicity: “la ciudad que nos revela Fresán es un
mundo múltiple e inabarcable en el que se dan cita las formas más diver-
sas de la información” (2003, p. 101).
9. Merrill argues that “the history of U.S. tourism in Latin America shows
that empire is a more nuanced system of inequality, resistance, and nego-
tiation than appears at first glance” (2009, p. 9). He argues that the
nature of tourism is one in which the tourist and host nation interact in
an uneven power structure in order to construct and negotiate national

identity.
10. For more on this see Eric Zolov’s Refried Elvis (1999).
11. The last section of Mantra occurs in a future Mexico City devastated by a
massive earthquake. The novel takes on pseudo-religious tones as the nar-
rator wanders through a technological landscape in which popular culture
has fused with mystical or spiritual aspects in a search for his own origins.
12. At the same time, the novel does not directly reflect on the idea of tour-
ism as occurs in Mantra. The tourist is an implied presence throughout
the novel.
13. The narration continues by emphasizing the importance of place for
Kensington Gardens—“Un antiguo mapa de finales del siglo XIX con
ocurrentes y detalladas ilustraciones en sus márgenes para así disimular la
poca precisión de su trazado. Kensington Gardens, sin embargo, aparece
como debe ser, como es: imposible confundirlo y no reconocerlo” (2003,
p. 133).
14. The text later references Ed Glinert’s A Literary Guide of London in which
Barrie is surpassed only by Dickens in entries.
15. This quote is followed by a passage that reinforces the idea that the urban
space is constantly in flux: “No hay futuro. No hay futuro para las mutac-
iones. No hay futuro para mi Londres que cometió el error de diseminar
su semilla en Tokio, en Berlin, cualquier día de éstos en Praga y, ah, otra
vez New York, siempre New York” (2003, p. 142).
16. The novel connects the author’s parents to, among others, 60s cultural
icons like Andy Warhol, Timothy Leary, Cat Stevens, Woody Allen,
Samuel Beckett, David Bowie, Marlon Brando, Truman Capote, Sean
Connery and Hugh Heffner (2003, pp. 200–214).
17. For example, the narrator mentions and even cites the biography The Story
of J.M.B. by Denis Mackail in numerous occasions (2003, pp. 188, 260,
273).
18. Emilse Hidalgo notes that Fresán and others demonstrate a shift away
from the highly revolutionary and combative texts of the 1970s with “a
cosmopolitan, multicultural, and pluralistic aesthetic centered on Borges.
Parady, quotation, irony, paradox, intertextuality, and apocryphal texts
became the preferred modes of an increasingly postmodern writing”
(2014, p. 107).
19. Furthermore, Borges passionately calls for an expansion of themes that
are not seen as purely “Argentine,” stating “nuestro patrimonio es el uni-
verso; ensayar todos los temas y no podemos concretarnos a lo argentino
para ser argentinos: porque o ser argentino es una fatalidad y en ese caso
lo seremos de cualquier modo, o ser argentino es una mera afectación,
una máscara” (1974, p. 274).
214 T. R. ROBBINS
20. Casanova argues that, “The writers of the Latin American ‘boom,’ for
example, began to exist in international literary space only with their
translation into French and their recognition by French critics” (2004,
p. 135).
21. Others, like Edmundo Paz Soldán and Jorge Volpi have followed another
literary tradition of living and working in the United States.
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Index
A D
Allegory, 48, 108, 179, 182, 187, 189 Debris, 10, 123, 125, 132, 134, 144
Año 0, 85, 122, 128, 161, 196, 212 Deterritorialization, 48, 69, 85, 118,
Apocalypse, 68–70, 72–75, 77–83, 87 119, 129, 155
Augé, Marc, 23, 47, 61, 62, 154, 171, Disaster, 20, 22, 25, 27, 30, 78, 79,
198 158
Dislocation, 48, 49, 58, 72, 154, 158,
159, 162, 164, 166, 169, 171,
B 189
Benjamin, Walter, 21, 43, 61, 197 Displacement, 48, 70, 71, 84, 99,
Boom, the, 15 104, 122, 147, 159, 162, 166
Drugs, 53, 99, 207
Dystopia, 67, 69, 71, 78–80, 83, 108,
C 191
Certeau, Michel de, 26, 98, 99, 102,
111, 140
Chaos, 9, 19–22, 25, 33, 36, 75, 77, F
80, 81, 83, 88, 102, 177, 191 Fantastic, the, 48, 51, 52, 57, 58, 60,
Consumption, 8, 102, 105, 154, 159, 61, 63
161, 165, 166, 168, 169, 171, Fear, 14, 24, 51, 52, 54, 58–61, 63,
187, 188 71, 82, 87, 88, 139, 167, 182
Corruption, 9, 34, 75–77, 94, 96, Flâneur, 21, 22, 36, 43, 44, 172. See
102, 103, 106, 108 also Walking
Crime, 8, 51, 55, 74, 80, 178, 180 Foucault, Michel, 2, 15, 63
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2019 217

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-92438-0
218 Index
G O
Geocriticism, 2, 15 Order, 4, 7, 14, 15, 20–22, 25, 27,
Geography, 2, 4, 52, 57, 63, 122, 142, 36, 47–49, 55, 57, 58, 84, 86,
186, 204, 207, 208 102, 106, 119, 124, 130, 177,
Ghosts, 47–50, 52, 55, 61, 145. See 183, 191
also Specter Other, the, 190, 194, 198, 200
Globalization, 5, 7, 12, 14, 86, 94, Overpopulation, 9, 20, 67, 83
109, 118, 119, 122, 133, 134,
154, 160, 161, 163, 165, 166,
170–172, 176, 177, 190, 191 P
Postmodern city, 7, 12–14
Poverty, 9, 20, 52, 74, 94, 96, 103,
H 104
Home, 28, 29, 51–53, 61, 105, 127, Production of space, 25, 181–183,
132, 142–144, 146, 154, 158, 187, 188, 190, 191
168, 169 Progress, 20, 23–25, 42, 71, 99, 148,
Homeless, 33, 50 149, 177
Prostitution, 53, 80, 81, 85, 94, 95,
99, 103, 108, 112
I Public space, 7, 8, 71, 81, 98, 100,
Immigrants, 147, 158, 162, 170 143
Inequality, 94, 96, 212
R
L Rama, Ángel, 4–6, 15, 16, 20, 47,
Lefebvre, Henri, 2, 15, 25, 26, 31, 32, 117, 120, 121, 123, 133
48, 102
Letrados, 4, 5
Lettered city, 5, 15, 16, 20, 27, 47, S
102, 104, 118, 120, 121 Segregation, 81
Soja, Edward, 2, 7, 14, 15
Solidarity, 33, 99, 109, 146, 188, 190
M Specter, 59–61, 139
Metro, 14, 19, 22–25, 27–35, 37–44, Subway, 23, 25, 28, 31–35, 37, 38,
171. See also Subway 41–43, 81, 137. See also Metro
Surveillance, 13
N
Nation-state, 118, 155 T
Nomadic, 40, 118, 155 Technopolis, 7
Index 219
Tourists, 7, 14, 154–158, 167, V

194–202, 209 Violence, 8, 9, 14, 20, 28, 29, 41, 53,
Transnational, 13, 61, 71, 108, 118, 56, 81, 94–96, 103, 167
119, 132, 154, 186, 187, 190
W
U Walking, 26, 98, 102, 111, 127, 128,
Uncanny, the, 48, 51, 53–55, 57, 62, 140
63 Walled city/neighborhood, 7, 8, 49,
Underground, 14, 23–25, 27, 42–44, 50, 52, 55, 56, 69, 74, 80, 101,
127, 128, 178, 180, 181, 184, 205
190, 191
Unemployment, 96, 103
Urban planning, 20, 43, 57, 80

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Hispanic Urban Studies

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This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer

1 The Spatial Turn and Twenty-First Century Latin

2 Beyond the Ruins of the Organized City: Urban

3 Spectral Spaces: Haunting in the Latin American City 47

4 A Tale of Three Cities: Urban Space in the Crack Novels

5 The Night That Repeats Itself: Social Dystopia

6 Urban Debris and Networking Imperialism

7 Place-Making in the Solitude of the City: Valeria

8 Dislocated Subjects in the Global City: Santiago

9 Roberto Bolaño’s Urban Labyrinths: The City as

10 The Tourist Aesthetic and Empire in Rodrigo

Eduard Arriaga is Assistant Professor of Global Languages and Cross-

Literatures and the Canon (Palgrave, 2014), a collection of critical essays

work in the Digital Humanities has received generous financial support

The Spatial Turn and Twenty-First Century

José Eduardo González

The project of compiling a volume focusing on studying the representation

© The Author(s) 2019 1

relationship has changed in the last couple of decades. As it often happens,

possibility of analyzing the fictional depiction of space as referring to a

Her novels challenge common Parisian themes in Latin American writing

A similar approach—to study first the tradition of spatial perception in

a role… The feminine and feminist voice is an essential avenue of this

One of the previously mentioned main sources of influence for the

of globalized services and shops in an environment beautified by parks

Geographical and sociological approaches to the urban space in Latin

and speculators” (1998, p. 32). Strangely, he uses Robinson Crusoe, a

From the standpoint of Latin American literary history, the assump-

imperative” that one could still detect in modernism has disappeared in

taken. When the Latin American author adopts a post-national perspec-

community between the two wandering expatriate Mexican writers.” In

Beyond the Ruins of the Organized City:

© The Author(s) 2019 19

associated with this “post-apocalyptical” vein, predominantly through

Mexico City, in the early twenty-first century, is a megalopolis of about

The chaotic image of the city relies, indeed, on the presupposition

as a mere source of insurmountability and doom impedes, according to

reign so as to, later, deconstruct this perspective and liberate a kind of

Underground Imaginaries and Their Uses

the historical and symbolic connotations of the underground have often

of Mexico City, a primary battlefield for the imposition of order in the

secondly, that is fragmented, separating, disjunctive, a space that locates

original). In the end, this “abstract” conception of space is a particularly

Blindness and the Underground:

background and certain ideological assumptions that are evident in her

López-Labourdette has analyzed the novel as a narration that breaks

La Cosa, who even might be thought to exercise a limited control

of social contact, and it represents a normative perspective on space,

abstract space through her explorations of the Metro. As Lefebvre recalls,

In this sense, it could be said, at first sight, that El huésped describes

Massage in the Metro: The Writings

Blindness, bodily sensations and the presence of crowds of travelers are

Disecado, and an “I” that bears striking resemblances to Bellatin himself

City. In his characterization of the city, he combines the stereotypical

and autobiographical project in order to be able to accept himself,

[e]sta situación de sentirme acompañado en el vacío ha hecho posi-

The Spatial Turn and Twenty-First Century

Beyond the Ruins of the Organized City:

Underground Imaginaries and Their Uses

Blindness and the Underground:

Massage in the Metro: The Writings

The City Is the Heaven of the Subway

Spectral Spaces: Haunting in the Latin

The City and Its Ghosts

A Tale of Three Cities: Urban Space

3. Regarding current tendencies in Central American literature, see Aguirre

10. Reguillo-Cruz, who studies the construction of the other in urban inter-

Urban Debris and Networking

Cities and Ideas in Latin America:

Narrating the Ruins of an Imperial Caribbean City