Blindness, Pilgrimage, Motherhood and Miracles in Twentieth Century Mexican Literature

Collective Bodies and Collective Change: Blindness, Pilgrimage, Motherhood and Miracles in Twentieth Century Mexican Literature

Rebecca Claire Suzanne Janzen

A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of Spanish and Portuguese University of Toronto

Collective Bodies and Collective Change: Blindness, Pilgrimage, Motherhood and Miracles in Twentieth Century Mexican Literature

Rebecca Claire Suzanne Janzen

Doctor of Philosophy

Department of Spanish and Portuguese University of Toronto

2013 Abstract

“Collective Bodies and Collective Change: Blindness, Pilgrimage, Motherhood and

Miracles in Twentieth Century Mexican Literature” examines Mexican literature from 1940 to

1980. It analyzes representations of collective bodies and suggests that these bodies illustrate oppression and resistance in their historical context, which coincides with the beginning of a period of massive modernization in Mexico. I aim to develop a reading that interprets this imagery of collectives, unusual bodies, and blindness as more than symbols of oppression. By examining this imagery alongside representations of pilgrimage, alternative modes of motherhood, and experiences such as miracles that figuratively connect bodies, I propose that these images challenge their historical context, and can be read as a gesture towards resistance.

Novels and short stories by José Revueltas, Juan Rulfo, Rosario Castellanos and Vicente

Leñero present collectives, blindness and unusual bodies. My reading of their works connects these textual bodies to oppression within their historical context, in particular, by the government, intellectuals, the medical system, the Catholic Church, family structure, the landholding system, and the land’s heat, wind and drought. These representations de- individualize characters, and, as such, destroy the ideal of the modern subject who would effect

ii change through individual agency. Thus, when I argue that these same bodies act as a metaphorical collective subject whose actions, such as mass murder, and participation in religious revival and radical political movements, can point out social change, they challenge the ideal of an individual subject. By reflecting on the connection between literature that represents unusual bodies, a historical situation of oppression, and the potential for resistance, this analysis of literary texts provides a lens through which we can examine the stories’ historical context and ideas of individual and collective agency.

iii

Acknowledgments

First, I would like to thank my supervisor, Dr. Susan Antebi, for her guidance throughout the writing process. My committee members, Dr. Sanda Munjic, who supervised my comprehensive examinations, and Dr. Néstor Rodríguez, were also instrumental to my project. Dr. Berenice Villagómez provided helpful comments and encouraged me to share my work through conference participation. Dr. Manuel Ramírez, an additional reader for the defense, also supported the project. I owe a special thanks to my external reader, Dr. Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado, for his invaluable suggestions.

I have been fortunate to share my graduate experience with many colleagues in Toronto and in Mexico City. My research trips to Mexico meant that Mexico City became my classroom for several months in 2011 and 2012. The Casa de los Amigos, Raquel Garcia and Pamela Fuentes deserve special mention, because without their friendship and hospitality, I would have been exposed to far fewer cultural and academic spaces. In Toronto, my working group offered encouragement and GCF taught me about rest and work.

This project owes so much to the support of family and friends. I would like to thank my parents, Bill Janzen and Marlene Toews Janzen, and Brian Ladd and Ghenette Houston, for their prayers, Anna Casas Aguilar for her ongoing feedback and Adleen Crapo and Paula Karger for their friendship.

Finally, I would like to acknowledge the Mexican Government’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs for its support for my doctoral project. “Esta tesis corresponde a las investigaciones realizadas con una beca otorgada por el Gobierno de México, a través de la Secretaría de Relaciones Exteriores.”

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ...... iv

Table of Contents ...... v

Introduction Collective Bodies: Corporeal Modes of Oppression and Resistance in 20th Century Mexican Literature ...... 1 Theories of Power in Relation to Revueltas, Rulfo, Castellanos and Leñero ...... 8 Situating Literary Texts in Mexican Modernity ...... 10 Collective Bodies in Literary Texts: Reflecting a Historical Context of Oppression ...... 14 Collective Bodies in Literary Texts: The Potential for a Collective Response ...... 17

1 A Blind Response to Power: José Revueltas’ Short Stories ...... 27 1.1 Understanding Power in Dios en la tierra and Dormir en tierra ...... 30 1.1.1 Revueltas’ Stories in Relation to the Institutionalizing Mexican State ...... 32 1.1.2 Intellectual Structures in Mexico and Revueltas’ Critique ...... 36 1.1.3 The Catholic Church in Revueltas’ Stories ...... 46 1.1.4 Family Structure: Institutionalizing Motherhood ...... 51 1.1.5 Myopic Medicine in “El hijo tonto” ...... 55 1.2 Connected Bodies as a Mode of Corporeal Resistance in Dios en la tierra and Dormir en tierra ...... 59

2 Motherhood, Pilgrimage and Collective Bodies in El llano en llamas ...... 70 2.1 Overpowering Rulfo’s Historical Context ...... 74 2.1.1 The Government Adopts a Cosmopolitan Vision ...... 76 2.1.2 Land Reform and Education Reinforce the State’s Power ...... 80 2.1.3 Consolidating Power in Presidential and Narrative Offices ...... 84 2.1.4 The Indomitable Madre Patria ...... 88 2.1.5 The Catholic Church and the Way of the Virgin ...... 95 2.1.6 Family Structure and the Way of Virginity ...... 100 2.2 A Path of Resistance in Rulfo’s Stories ...... 105

3 Oppression, Supplementary Motherhood and Indigenous Resistance in Rosario Castellanos’ Oficio de tinieblas ...... 114 3.1 Powerful Entities in the Novel ...... 117 3.1.1 The Landownership System ...... 119 v

3.1.2 Land Reform: “No por primera vez” ...... 126 3.1.3 Complicit and Conflicted Intellectuals ...... 130 3.1.4 Narrative Strategies Reflect a State Repressing Chaos ...... 135 3.1.5 The Subordinate Church ...... 139 3.2 Framing Resistance in Oficio ...... 142 3.2.1 Indigenous Religious Practice ...... 143 3.2.2 Supplementary Maternal Relationships ...... 145 3.2.3 Domingo’s Crucifixion ...... 153

4 Leñero, Liberation Theology and Luke’s Gospel in Mexico: El evangelio de Lucas Gavilán ...... 158 4.1 El evangelio Critiques its Historical and Political Context ...... 160 4.1.1 Representing a Repressive State ...... 162 4.1.2 Confronting a Segregated Medical System ...... 166 4.1.3 Leñero and El evangelio Reject Intellectual Power Structures ...... 168 4.1.4 Challenging the Church with Religious Imagery ...... 170 4.1.5 El evangelio at Home: Family Structure in Mexico ...... 174 4.2 Formal Structure in the Novel: Confining and Liberating ...... 175 4.3 El evangelio Emphasizes Jesucristo’s Humanity ...... 180 4.4 Miracles Connect Characters’ Bodies ...... 185

Conclusion Aparta de mí este cáliz and Crónicas of the Mexico City Subway ...... 194 The More Things Change: Aparta de mí este cáliz ...... 196 The More They Stay the Same: The Urban Landscape and Crónicas of the Mexico City Subway ...... 202

Works Cited ...... 210

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Introduction Collective Bodies: Corporeal Modes of Oppression and Resistance in 20th Century Mexican Literature

In September, I stood in the Secretaría de Educación Pública building in Mexico City’s historic downtown and stared at Diego Rivera’s murals. In these murals, painted between 1923 and 1928, urban workers carry red flags and campesinos (peasants) become revolutionary soldiers. The murals bring communist symbols, including these red flags, as well as the hammer and the sickle, into conversation with Mexican and Catholic imagery of corn, the Virgin and martyrs. Revolutionary heroes, such as Emiliano Zapata, are portrayed as martyrs or as Christ.

With their hands outstretched, these figures are draped in red cloths and in some cases appear to be burned by people who do not understand them. As I walked through three stories of paintings, it became clear to me that these murals were meant to educate people about their collective role in the recent Revolution and to convince them that this past would lead to a better future. 1

Likewise, literary texts relate collective action and social change; like some of these murals, they represent conditions of oppression that lead to the perceived need for resistance. To gain their readers’ attention, the texts emphasize their characters’ bodies in dramatic and violent ways. For example, Vicente Leñero’s novel El evangelio de Lucas Gavilán (1979) presents a man called Jesucristo Gómez who heals people’s madness, physical illnesses and lack of motivation. Once transformed, the healed characters participate in Gómez’s attempts to

1 Murals were a significant part of the post-Revolutionary Mexican State and were integral to the development of a post-Revolutionary national aesthetic (see for example Sánchez Prado Naciones intelectuales 40). They cover the walls at several ministries, the Palacio Nacional, and museums, and illustrate the collective role of workers and campesinos in Mexico’s past and future. For instance, Juan O’Gorman’s murals inside the Museo Nacional de Historia and Castillo de Chapultepec in Mexico City (1960-1961), like Rivera’s, demonstrate the role of the collective body over the course of the 20th century in Mexico.

2 transform the Catholic Church and the Mexican government. José Revueltas’ short story “Dios en la tierra” (1944), from a collection of the same name, connects social transformation and collective action in a way that reminds us of the sacrificial Revolutionary leaders in Rivera’s murals. This story presents a group of rural Mexicans who work together to explicitly reverse government-imposed change, specifically with regards to education. In this story, the government has sent the town a teacher who will educate its children according to its secular and socialist program. The rural characters want to get rid of this teacher and so they crucify him by impaling him on a stick like a scarecrow. The characters’ collective achievement is politically motivated; their decision to transform their reality depends on their embodied action, and its results connect this action to the possibility of social transformation.2

These examples suggest that collective participation in a political or religious project responds to repression and may lead to social change; they also highlight the role of embodied actions and the collective in this process. This dissertation examines representations of collective bodies in literary texts that correspond with a historical situation of oppression, modernization and industrialization in Mexico. It proposes that these representations of collective bodies act in ways that facilitate transformation within the text, that is, as a collective, the characters’ bodies work together towards a political or religious goal. We see these collective bodies in the portrayal of unjust racial and gender relationships in Rosario Castellanos’ 1962 novel Oficio de tinieblas. My analysis of this novel focuses on how a character revives indigenous beliefs, connects to her followers through her eyes and uses this movement as a basis to violently confront the government, the Catholic Church and property owners. The fourth chapter of this

2 For further information on Mexican history, see Héctor Aguilar Camín and Lorenzo Meyer’s A la sombra de la Revolución Mexicana.

3 dissertation turns to individual characters, who, after being ignored by the Catholic Church, doctors and the agrarian reform system, undergo a similar experience of healing in Leñero’s novel. After this experience, they then participate in a religious movement aligned with liberation theology, which challenges agrarian reform and government corruption in the text.

My project will use a case study approach and examine Mexican literature that interacts with and illuminates the country’s complex and violent post-Revolutionary political history.

Novels and short stories from 1940 to 1980 reflect their historical context, which coincides with a period of massive modernization in Mexico. Historians, including Héctor Aguilar Camín and

Lorenzo Meyer, have called this period the “Mexican Miracle” (1940-1968) and Gareth

Williams has broadened this time frame to call the period from 1920 to 1982 Mexican modernity, beginning at the end of the Revolution and concluding with the 1982 petroleum crisis

(11-12).3 It is widely recognized that Mexican literature from this period (1940-1980) reflects an oppressive State, and, indeed, represents a tragic vision of Mexican modernity.4 For example, in

Narrative Innovation and Political Change in Mexico, critic John S. Brushwood argues that

Mexican literature in the 1960s and 1970s presents widespread poverty and social restlessness

(43, 65). Brushwood adds that this literature also “suggests the possibility of some new concept of social organization,” in other words, that it points to social transformation (Narrative

3 The notion of modernity is contentious. For example, historian Mary Kay Vaughan, in her study of education, culture and nation in Mexico in the 1930s, maintains that there was continuity between the pre-and post- Revolutionary periods in Mexico. As a result, although she recognizes that the Revolution shaped the modernization process in Mexico, she does not specifically date the period “Mexican modernity” (10). 4 I employ the term State interchangeably with the Mexican government in this dissertation as my analysis suggests that the Mexican State struggled with other entities, such as the Catholic Church. Gareth Williams’ analysis of power in the Mexican context applies the term State to systemic oppression in Mexico that includes the government, the Catholic Church and the landholding system.

Innovation 71).5 Armando Pereira and Claudio Albarrán would agree. They establish that from

1947 to 1968, Mexican literature commented on society and questioned social order (82-9). This literature undoubtedly challenged the government’s policies. Revueltas’ “Dios en la tierra,” for instance, comments on the 1926 to 1929 Cristero War, a conflict between the government and the Catholic Church that took place primarily in rural areas. The story challenges the wisdom of the Mexican government’s imposition of teachers in rural Mexico, illustrates religious and political oppression and culminates as the campesinos murder the teacher in an instance of hostile social change.

This dissertation analyzes these characters in Revueltas’ story alongside characters in other novels and short stories by Juan Rulfo, Rosario Castellanos and Vicente Leñero. I build on existing criticism to propose that these characters’ bodies demonstrate the effects of powerful entities in the Mexican context, such as the Catholic Church, the government, family structure, intellectuals, the medical system and landholding patterns, and, in some cases, the land itself.6

Literary texts allow us to examine the relationship between these powers, and, by focusing on dialogue, or narration aligned with powerful characters, to analyze these entities’ effects on less powerful characters. I posit that as these literary representations of everyday Mexicans often come to exhibit unusual physical features, become mobs or experience repetitive instances of healing, they illustrate systems of religious, political, intellectual and patriarchal oppression. I

5 Further information about Mexican literary history from the 1940s to the 1980s can be found in José Agustín’s Tragicomedia mexicana 1 and Tragicomedia mexicana 2, Deborah Cohn’s “The Mexican Intelligentsia, 1950-1968: Cosmopolitanism, National Identity, and the State” and Ignacio Sánchez Prado’s Naciones intelectuales: las fundaciones de la modernidad literaria mexicana (1917-1959).

6 The land is distinct from these other structures of power; however, as it relates strongly to land reform, integral to Mexico’s post-Revolutionary project, and because it affects characters’ bodies in similar ways as the Church, the State and family structure, I include it in this list here and throughout the dissertation.

5 also argue these characters’ bodies, either as mobs or as metaphorical collectives, could point to social transformation. This dissertation begins with Revueltas’ “Dios en la tierra,” “El hijo tonto,” “¿Cuánta será la oscuridad?” and “La frontera increíble” from Dios en la tierra (1944) and Dormir en tierra (1960). It then turns to Rulfo’s stories, “Nos han dado la tierra,” “Macario,”

“Talpa” and “Luvina” from El llano en llamas (1953), continues by considering Castellanos’ novel Oficio de tinieblas (1962), and concludes with Leñero’s El evangelio de Lucas Gavilán

(1979).

I situate these texts in their political and historical reality to highlight oppression; then, as

I examine resistance, I reframe these literary works to consider an alternative worldview, in many cases drawing on the authors’ own political leanings to reach this conclusion. Revueltas, for instance, was a dedicated communist, and so my reading of his work is influenced by his essays, diaries and letters, which illustrate his interpretation of this plan for social change. At the same time, reading with a deliberate political intent means that I bring literary analysis and political and historical context together to explore the notion that literature might prescribe social change just as much as political writings. My reading thus explicitly connects literature to its context and draws on the authors’ political and journalistic writing, as well as theoretical texts.

To understand how the literary texts represent oppression, I turn to Foucault and

Althusser’s theories of power. I employ Althusser’s division between the State and Ideological

State Apparatuses (ISAs) to label powerful entities in the Mexican context, and Foucault’s notion that power circulates to describe how powerful characters influence the less powerful. In these moments, less powerful characters “lose their individuality” and come to exhibit many features similar to what Giorgio Agamben describes as bare life. I argue that these powerful characters, such as the property owner Leonardo in Oficio de tinieblas, are oppressive precisely because

6 their interactions negate the less powerful characters’ individuality, in Leonardo’s case, by acting violently towards women and indigenous people.7

In the Mexican context, which I survey after discussing Foucault and Althusser’s theories of power, politicians, clergy and intellectuals have historically negated the potential for individual autonomy, in particular, bodily autonomy, and denied this idealized vision of individual agency to other Mexicans. Following this understanding of the individual as a limited category, and considering the denial of individual autonomy in the Mexican context, I introduce oppression and resistance in relation to the literary texts, suggesting that the characters’ loss of individuality is as much an effect of oppression as it is a precondition for resistance.

This understanding of the potential for resistance is based on reading metaphorical connections between characters’ bodies, and as such, is not always dependent on powerful characters’ direct actions or the materiality of powerless characters’ bodily experiences. For this reason, when analyzing resistance in the dissertation, I turn to another theoretical lineage, influenced by feminist theory, which has vindicated women’s bodies, disability studies, which emphasizes bodies and experiences that deviate from the “norm,” and phenomenology, which studies subjective experience. This introduction explores how characters’ bodies offer an alternative to the ideal of individual subjectivity through the works of Julia Kristeva, co-authors

David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder and Patrícia Vieira. It then moves towards a theory of the collective body through Elizabeth Grosz, Gail Weiss and Jasbir K. Puar.

7 This is based on the assumption that obtaining individual agency is an ideal; however, as historian Joan Wallach Scott reminds us, the individual, while a Western ideal, is an inherently limited and problematic category (5). For more information, see the first chapter of Scott’s Only Paradoxes to Offer, which synthesizes the importance of the individual in Western philosophy, history and emancipatory movements.

These works, which respond primarily to non-Mexican contexts, allow me to read corporeal modes of oppression and resistance in Mexican literary texts and explore how collective bodies in a literary text can reflect their context and transform literary situations. This may also relate to “real life” in Mexico, and illuminate indigenous uprisings, the Cristero War and strikes and protests in the 1950s and 1960s. If applied to contemporary novels or crónicas, this theory could inform our understanding of phenomena such as violence on the Mexico-US border and the experiences of masses of people on the Mexico City subway; hence, in my reading, literary reflections create avenues for interpreting ongoing social change.8

Revueltas, Rulfo, Castellanos and Leñero’s novels and short stories represent a government that attempts to control Mexican people, particularly in rural areas. This government struggles with the Catholic Church, traditional family structure and landholding patterns, and on occasion, the land. In the texts, representations and representatives of the government clash with priests, mothers, finqueros (large property owners) and wind, earthquakes and heat. The texts’ narrative strategies, such as shifting and competing narrative voices, reinforce this sense of struggle. In each novel or story, characters acquire monstrous characteristics or lose their individual features as they undergo repetitive experiences. These experiences suggest that as representatives of the Church, the government or the family, such as teachers or clergy members, struggle with one another, and with the land, they oppress other characters. For instance, Rulfo’s

“Talpa” describes a Catholic mass at the end of an arduous, dusty pilgrimage by emphasizing the pilgrims’ feet, and Revueltas’ “Dios en la tierra” presents a drought that leads soldiers to think of nothing but thirst. By describing the pilgrims or soldiers in the same way, in my view, these

8 The word crónica (chronicle) refers to some kind of political, historical or cultural commentary; cronista is the political, historical or cultural observer.

8 literary representations cause these characters to lose their individuality. Paradoxically, in

Revueltas, Rulfo, Castellanos and Leñero, these de-individualized or monstrous characters figuratively connect with one another, and in some cases, transform their situation. This suggests that de-individualized or monstrous entities in a novel or short story reflect systemic oppression and help us envision a model of social transformation whereby those marginalized by political and religious programs, such as campesinos, urban workers, women and indigenous people, might challenge those priests, intellectuals, teachers and government officials ostensibly in charge of these same programs. Since I sustain that these texts represent and respond to their historical and political context, it follows that this understanding of social change interprets this historical context by paying attention to the way that these novels and short stories represent those excluded from it.

Theories of Power in Relation to Revueltas, Rulfo, Castellanos and Leñero

These literary texts suggest that social transformation would involve change in each of

Mexico’s powerful entities. Foucault provides us with an analytical framework that identifies and explores the nature of these powerful entities. In “Society Must be Defended,” he states that:

power is not something that is divided between those who have it and hold it exclusively,

and those who do not have it and are subject to it. Power must, I think, be analyzed as

something that circulates… Power is exercised through networks, and individuals do not

simply circulate in those networks; they are in a position to both submit to and exercise

this power… In other words, power passes through individuals. (29)

Louis Althusser’s understanding of Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (ISAs), although different from Foucault’s emphasis on the diffuse nature of power, further illuminates my

9 conceptualization of power in these novels and short stories as it divides power up into entities that coincide with the Mexican context. Althusser argues that in the 20th century, the State has been the primary holder of power, and represses individuals subject to it; he then enumerates

ISAs, such as the Church and education, that work in the private sphere to continue the State’s repressive work (143). Applying this terminology to the Mexican context, we encounter power divided between several institutions. Most significantly, intellectuals, teachers and doctors act on

State power, but struggle to influence the Church, family structure and landholding patterns.9

In each novel and short story, the State and ISAs affect characters so that they might submit to or exercise power related to diverse institutions. In Revueltas’ “Dios en la tierra,” for instance, power is not evenly divided between the teacher, the townspeople and the soldiers. The teacher submits to the government that pays his salary and challenges the religiously motivated townspeople by showing a well to a group of thirsty soldiers (16).10 In this case, the State controls education and the military while competing with the Church and the land. The teacher acts on State power for a limited time, to overpower the townspeople and assist the soldiers. The soldiers similarly exercise State power, which we see when the townspeople call them

“federales” (13, 16). Like the teacher, the soldiers, who likely receive compensation from the government, attempt to dominate the townspeople (12). The land’s dust circulates around the soldiers as the head dries up the land, making sure that the soldiers “no podían pensar, no tenía en el cerebro otra cosa que la sed” (15). This “natural” power is also tied in some strange way to the townspeople, who are likened to rocks from the story’s opening line: “[l]a población estaba

9 It is worth noting that some of Mexico’s most prominent Marxists, such as Adolfo Sánchez Vázquez and José Revueltas, were sharply critical of Althusser and his methods. See for example Stefan Gandler’s Marxismo crítico en México (225-245) or Bruno Bosteels’ Marx and Freud in Latin America (79). 10 In the introduction, all parenthetical references from literary texts come from Revueltas’ “Dios en la tierra,” in Dios en la tierra (11-16) and “La frontera increíble” in Dormir en tierra (35-42).

10 cerrada con odio y con piedras” (11). When the townspeople crucify the teacher for showing their enemies their well, they exercise the religious power that dominates them by shouting

“¡Viva Cristo Rey!” The teacher, too, is forced to utter their battle cry (16). For an instant, the townspeople, allied with the land and religion, overpower the teacher, and the State power to which he points. The teacher begins to blend into his surroundings, so that from far away, he appears like a scarecrow on a stick, “agitándose como si lo moviera el viento, el viento que ya corría, llevando la voz profunda, ciclópea, de Dios, que había pasado por la tierra” (16). This story shows us that power is not attached to a single entity. Representatives and symbols of the

State, the Catholic Church, and the land, the teacher, the soldiers and the townspeople, struggle with one another in this story. Power in the other novels and stories acts in a similar way: it is not tied to a single character or entity, or always divided up evenly between Althusser’s State and

ISAs. Nor can we simply to categorize good against bad: the teacher followed the government’s project for secular socialist reform, which cost him his life, while the townspeople maintained a traditional way of life tied to the Church and killed the teacher.11

Situating Literary Texts in Mexican Modernity

Religious conflict in “Dios en la tierra” demonstrates one of Mexico’s significant historical, religious and political struggles in the 20th century. Throughout the first part of the century, the Mexican government was notoriously unstable. After the Mexican Revolution officially ended with the 1917 Constitution, the Mexican state struggled to define itself: the two decades following this event are marked by conflict. This includes the Cristero War, and a conflict between the Church and the State over education between 1932 and 1938. To assert its

11 This division between the teacher and the townspeople reflects a longstanding conflict between urban and rural areas in Latin American history and heightened tensions in post-Revolutionary Mexico. A landmark text in this regard is Domingo Faustino Sarmiento’s Facundo: civilización y barbarie (1845).

11 dominance over the Church, education and, indeed, Mexican people, the State developed a single party political system whose tentacles of power extended to most aspects of life in the country.

Those in charge of the party influenced other Mexicans by recruiting them to join their project: by reaching mutually beneficial agreements with the Church and by recruiting men to work as bureaucrats, land reform officials and teachers. In 1938, the winners of the Mexican Revolution became the Mexican Revolutionary Party (PRM), and began developing affiliated organizations through which they could control vast sectors of the population.12 They created the Congreso de

Trabajadores Mexicanos (CTM) for workers and the Confederación Nacional Campesina (CNC) for campesinos. These institutional successes led to a rebranding. The PRM became the Partido

Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) in 1946, and the primary power in Mexico for the remainder of the 20th century.

The Mexican government also attempted to extend its power to the intellectual realm, because, as Edward Said would state in 1994, the “co-optation and inclusion of intellectuals by power can… effectively quieten their voices” (18). In the 1920s and 1930s, the Mexican State promoted nationalistic projects that valued novels and artistic creation about the Revolution. In spite of the government’s emphasis on “lo mexicano,” and the equation between Mexico and the

Revolution, these decades also produced the avant-garde contemporáneos and estridentistas, who opposed this equation. Mexican intellectuals appropriated universal culture in order to transcend Mexico’s particular themes and problems. As Vicente Torres notes, “la cultura universal ha[bía] dejado de serles ajena” (13). Spanish intellectuals in exile in Mexico after the

12 The Mexican Revolution involved so much infighting that the country had 7 presidents between 1910 and 1920, including one, Pedro Lascuráin, whose term lasted only 45 minutes, in addition to armed conflict between Constitutionalist and Conventionalist factions. For further information on this time period, see Aguilar Camín and L. Meyer or Adolfo Gilly’s The Mexican Revolution: A New Press People’s History.

Spanish Civil War further influenced Mexican intellectual circles. José Gaos, who is credited with bringing European philosophy to Mexico, read Marx and other prominent European philosophers in a way that encouraged Mexican intellectuals to move beyond conceiving of their artistic and literary projects as either promoting or critiquing state nationalism (Sánchez Prado

Naciones intelectuales 189). As Ignacio Sánchez Prado has argued, Mexican literature integrated itself into the Western tradition (Naciones intelectuales 189-90).

The PRI remained in power in the 1950s. By this time, it had reached a tacit agreement with the Church, in which the Church was incorporated into the PRI’s system as it promoted unity, order, social peace and conformism in service of the State (Loaeza “Notas” 46-48).

Traditional landholding patterns remained largely unchanged, and so the PRI, fearing mobilization among workers or campesinos, sought ways to gain their support. For example, under president Adolfo López Mateos (1958-1964), it revitalized agrarian reform, and distributed massive amounts of land to campesinos, generally through the ejido system. Yet, the land was often of poor quality, and the ejido system so corrupt, that campesinos continued to migrate to cities to find work. This meant that they rented their land to large property owners; thus, land reform ultimately reinforced existing social patterns.13

In the 1950s and 1960s, the PRI continued its attempt to consolidate power over the intellectual realm, in this case, by encouraging intellectual expressions aligned with its interests.

13 The ejido is a communal landholding system dating to pre-Conquest Mexico. At that time, it referred to communal pastures; in the mid 19th century, this land was repossessed by the government and sold to large landholders. In the early 20th century, Mexican president Cárdenas attempted to redistribute land, and many rural Mexicans opted for small plots of less than 5 acres, or communal lands administered by ejido commissions. Throughout the 20th century the Mexican government paid lip service to the ejido while continually ignoring that these commissions were often corrupt and that many people were leaving their small properties and migrating to cities (Nathan 276-7). The corrupt commissions did not provide necessary capital, which prevented campesinos from successfully farming their plots of land.

As the Mexican government became more invested in the international sphere, it incorporated the avant-garde movements from the 1920s and 1930s into its own cultural policies, which encouraged universalist rather than nationalist tendencies (Pereira and Albarrán 119). It promoted its vision through its close relationship with diverse media, including the television network Televisa, newspapers such as Novedades and El Heraldo de México, its press, the Fondo de Cultura Económica (FCE), and scholarships and prizes (Agustín Tragicomedia mexicana 1

90; Cohn 165). Intellectuals congregated at these and other institutions; the combination of government interest in internationalization, and the existing interests in intellectual circles, brought Mexico into greater contact with European and US writers, which in turn led to experiments in narrative style. The government thus incorporated what were initially avant-garde artistic projects into its own intellectual and cultural policies, which led to the widespread adoption of these universal or cosmopolitan approaches.

Moreover, economic growth and development associated with the “Mexican Miracle” came about through industrialization, urbanization and a closer relationship between Mexico and the US. Indeed, during World War Two, Mexicans had been invited to work in American factories, and after the War, the US sponsored Mexico’s participation in the international arena.

Stories such as Revueltas’ “El hijo tonto” demonstrate the effects of this rapid change by presenting a lower-class urban family that in all likelihood had migrated from a rural area seeking a better future. A female character, Mariana, is dying in her bed, her day-labourer husband is unable to find work, and their “stupid” child cannot help her. The persistent presence of rural Mexico in Rulfo’s stories and Castellanos’ novel, however, points out that Mexican campesinos, like their lower-class urban counterparts, did not take part in the government’s narrative of modernization, urbanization and progress, which largely benefitted wealthy landowners, and government and church officials.

At the same time as the PRI oversaw this period of growth and development, it faced opposition from its most loyal supporters. For instance, in the late 1950s, a PRI-affiliated union of railway workers decided to move in a new direction. In 1958-1959, two sectional leaders,

Demetrio Vallejo and Valentín Campo, challenged the union’s PRI-supported leader. The PRI then used police and military action to repress the independent-minded union leaders and their supporters. Campesinos also responded to increased possibilities. They developed their own organizations outside of the CNC, such as the Unión General de Obreros y Campesinos de

México (Aguilar Camín and L. Meyer 219-221). After a decade of this type of sustained social change, a national strike committee formed in Mexico City to protest widespread repression and government interference with the autonomous university system. In October 1968, snipers employed by the Mexican government opened fire on these protesters, in what is now called the

Tlatelolco massacre. This massacre, coupled with slower economic growth, ongoing corruption in the land reform system, other arms of government and the Catholic Church, showed Mexicans that its “miraculous” development had ended. After this moment, it became clear that ISAs enjoyed a very close relationship with the State. If journalists, such as Vicente Leñero at

Excelsior, challenged the government’s control, they found themselves forced into alternate avenues of employment.

Collective Bodies in Literary Texts: Reflecting a Historical Context of Oppression

Revueltas’ short stories respond to the beginning of this “miracle of development,” and, through narrative experimentation, bring Mexican themes into conversation with other literary traditions. As a man who challenged the government, the Catholic Church and the Communist

Party, Revueltas created literary works that confront these powerful entities and assert the land’s bizarre natural power. In his stories, characters become monsters or perform similar actions

15 together, to confront priests, pastors and teachers. They suggest that collective embodiment is an effect of oppression and might also lead to social transformation. “La frontera increíble,” for instance, represents a man on his deathbed about to receive the Sacrament of Extreme Unction or

Last Rites from a priest whose stole is leaking into a used bedpan. This foul mixture of the sacred and the profane ridicules the Church and presents the opportunity for resisting it. The story also challenges family structure: the man’s sister and his wife exhibit the same involuntary reaction to his death, “después de un minuto de inmovilidad increíble, de inaudito estupor y vacíos ojos sin lágrimas, se santiguaron maquinalmente. Después desnudaron su cuerpo” (42).14

That their eyes are vacant as they strip the corpse subtly critiques their performance of the prescribed roles of grieving wife and sister. This challenge, together with the story’s earlier ridicule of the priest, suggests that de-individualized characters confront both the Church and family structure.

Rulfo and Castellanos, widely celebrated authors with various governmental positions and awards between them, consider themes such as land reform and religion. While Rulfo’s work does not outline a plan for collective resistance, it uses uniquely Mexican experiences, such as a religious pilgrimage in the state of Jalisco, to comment on universal themes of healing, longing and loss (“Talpa”). Moreover, as the critical tradition has noted, his stories explore the effects of the government’s actions on everyday people.15 “Nos han dado la tierra,” for instance, represents a group of men as they walk across the dry land they have been given to farm; in so doing, the story demonstrates the injustice and inequality inherent in land reform. In Rulfo’s stories, the

14 Although death signifies the annihilation of the subject, and is a significant part of Mexican culture, as Revueltas, Rulfo, Castellanos and Leñero’s texts do not deal with it in a consistent way, it will not form part of the dissertation. 15 See for example Helmy F. Giacoman’s edited collection, Juan Rulfo: homenaje.

16 characters’ collective response to their circumstances relates to potential social transformation.

A decade later, Rosario Castellanos responds to the Mexican government’s interest in internationalization and aesthetic innovation by presenting a novel, Oficio de tinieblas, that is simultaneously universal and rooted in the Mexican context. This fragmentary text, told from several different points of view, follows, in one sense, universalist tendencies; yet, its setting in the indigenous community in Chiapas, falls in line with the author’s work for the Instituto

Nacional Indigenista (INI). In this novel, race and gender are significant issues, as the story revolves around Catalina, a character, who, together with her husband, leads an uprising that employs indigenous beliefs to oppose the Catholic Church and landholding patterns. We also see how the State is powerless against the Church and the rural landownership system through a character called Fernando de Ulloa who is sent from Mexico City to administer land reform; he soon realizes that the central government he represents is powerless to challenge longstanding traditions. Other characters in the text form pseudo-maternal bonds with one another, which I call supplementary or prosthetic motherhood, which I proposes creates an alternative family structure. In Castellanos’ work, wealthy male landowners hold the most power; but Fernando,

Catalina, and her religious and political movement also exert power and subject others for short periods of time.

Leñero’s novel El evangelio de Lucas Gavilán adapts the Biblical Gospel of Luke section-by-section in order to critique a political situation where the PRI has lost all credibility and where the Church, given its longstanding relationship with the PRI, is hugely corrupt. The government struggles to control the country, through its bureaucracy of land reform, trade unions and campesino groups. The novel challenges a straightforward division of power by showing that the PRI struggled to convince the Mexican population that its power was still greater than and distinct from the other elements it had previously managed to control. The text provides repeated

17 and formulaic examples of wounds and healing in which the fictional saviour, Jesucristo, travels to a new part of Mexico, meets a character with some kind of problem, such as a gallbladder that needs to be removed, ingeniously heals that character, for example by convincing a doctor to operate on an older woman. Through this formula, I suggest that wounded characters acquire a common identity, and as Jesucristo invites them to parties or public gatherings, I read a moment of resistance.

Collective Bodies in Literary Texts: The Potential for a Collective Response

In Revueltas, Rulfo, Castellanos and Leñero, power is diffused between characters tied to the State and various ISAs. Characters that represent the government, the Catholic Church, family structure and landholding patterns exert power to remove other characters’ individual agency. In Revueltas’ short stories, rural characters become a mob; the land, and representatives of the government and the Catholic Church in Rulfo’s stories animalize characters and give male characters female characteristics; in Castellanos’ novel, a mob of indigenous people kills a priest, sacrifices a young boy and attempts to reclaim its land rights; and repetitive miracles that heal characters’ wounds remove individuality in Leñero’s novel. Each text highlights the characters’ violence, monstrosity, and wounds so that they exist in a condition not unlike Giorgio

Agamben’s “bare life.” As Agamben argues, the sovereign begins to assert its power by reducing others to this state, and when people live as “bare life,” a life stripped of all rights, they demonstrate their subjection to the sovereign’s power (53).16 In the Mexican context, the State, the Church, landholding patterns and family structure could be interpreted as the sovereign.

16 Williams chooses not to include Agamben in his recent analysis of Mexican politics, democracy and literature, because he argues that Agamben does not engage in a historically specific analysis (10). It is also important to note that for Agamben, bare life precludes community. I argue that in Revueltas, Rulfo, Castellanos and Leñero, characters’ existence as bare life can be precondition for a collective challenge.

Following Agamben, they assert their power by subjecting other people. In a literary text, it would follow that characters such as teachers, bureaucrats and priests, begin asserting their power by dehumanizing other characters. Agamben adds that this

state of exception, which was essentially [only to be] a temporary suspension of the

juridico-political order, now becomes a new and stable spatial arrangement inhabited by

the bare life that more and more can no longer be inscribed in that order. (99)

Those living in this state as bare life exist in constant flight or in a foreign land (103). Continuing to read these characters with Agamben in mind, we see that given their state of oppression they are often forced to flee their physical situation. For instance, characters in Revueltas’ “¿Cuánta será la oscuridad?” flee to the desert following the attack of a Catholic mob. Returning to

Althusser, who states that “[t]here are no subjects except by and for their subjection” (182, emphasis in text), these less powerful characters become subjects as they are brutalized and what

Althusser calls interpellated, by representatives of the State and ISAs. As the literary texts suggest figurative connections between these characters, or represent brutalized characters fused with one another as mobs, they imply that the subject in Mexico’s modernizing context is not an individual but rather a collective. Hence, in Revueltas, Rulfo, Castellanos and Leñero, representations of mobs and figuratively connected characters speak to the limitations and potential of a collective body.

The texts may employ such embodied imagery because of existing understandings of the body in Mexico. The early 20th century Mexican minister of education, José Vasconcelos, for instance, was instrumental in developing a biopolitical program that would administer the bodies of Mexicans as a collective, so that the country could progress towards his vision of ideal future.

This collective body, according to Vasconcelos’ landmark text, La raza cósmica, was imperfect,

19 and some parts were to be annihilated. To create this cosmic race, “los muy feos no procrearán, no desearán procrear; ¿qué importa entonces que todas las razas se mezclan si la fealdad no encontrará cuna?” (50). At the same time, this collective was also “dotada de maleabilidad, comprensión rápida y emoción fácil, fecundos elementos para el plasma germinal de la especie futura” (59). Vasconcelos’ understanding of the body ties collective and unusual bodies in literary texts to their historical context and highlights the role of collective entities in social transformation, and thus informs my literary analysis.17

To develop the connection between collective bodies, social transformation and literary text, I turn to Julia Kristeva, David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder and Patrícia Vieira. Each notes how certain conditions, such as the abject, disability in general or blindness specifically make a traditional understanding of agency, which values the individual, impossible. In other words, these theorists acknowledge individual subjectivity even if by negation. Since the abject, disability and blindness figure prominently in literary texts examined in this dissertation, I take advantage of their contributions.

Taking that into consideration, I turn to Julia Kristeva. In her groundbreaking work,

Powers of Horror, Kristeva asks,

If it is true that the abject beseeches and pulverizes the subject, one can understand that

it is experienced at the peak of its strength when that subject, weary of fruitless attempts

to identify with something on the outside, finds the impossible within; when it finds that

17 Diego Rivera’s murals relate to Vasconcelos’ ideology and his murals at the Secretaría de Educación Pública headquarters in Mexico City were painted between 1923 and 1928, partially under Vasconcelos’ tenure as Minister of Education (1921 to 1924) (“Los Murales de Diego Rivera en la Secretaría de Educación Pública”).

the impossible constitutes its very being, that it is none other than abject. (5, emphasis in

text)

In other words, according to Kristeva, people can act as agents by reconciling themselves with the fact that they embody the abject. David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder adopt some of

Kristeva’s ideas, even as they refer to the function of deviant bodies in literary texts as part of a narrative strategy, whereas for Kristeva the subject appears in a psychoanalytic framework. In

Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse, Mitchell and Snyder state that deformed bodies create a “deviant subjectivity [that] erupts from the surface of its bodily container” (58). By deviating from the individual body, deformed bodies in literature might then be thought of as already forging connections with other bodies. Patrícia Vieira, in Seeing Politics

Otherwise: Vision in Latin American and Iberian Fiction, examines blindness specifically in order to argue that when characters exist as bare life, particularly in a state of blindness, they can form connections with others (46). Hence, Vieira, perhaps idealistically, reads blindness as potentiality. For her, “blindness is paradoxically a symbol of the dismemberment of a past mold of subjectivity and turns into a condition of possibility for the subjects’ self-remaking” (4).

Revueltas, Rulfo, Castellanos and Leñero’s texts employ abject imagery, such as open sores and fecal matter, and present deviant bodies, including blind characters. In accordance with Mitchell and Snyder and Kristeva, this imagery would deform or dismember individual subjectivity, were such subjectivity ever within the reach of characters in the texts I study. These images also correspond to a vision of embodied, collective subjectivity, which, following Vieira, takes advantage of the impossibility of individual subjectivity and allows for collective re-making or transformation.

To develop this alternative vision of subjectivity, I draw on Elizabeth Grosz, Gail Weiss and Jasbir K. Puar. Their conceptualizations, while not directly applicable to Revueltas, Rulfo,

Castellanos or Leñero, allow me to develop my ideas. Grosz’s ideas establish the embodied nature of subjectivity and vindicate the equation between women and their bodies. In Volatile

Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism, for instance, she develops what she calls embodied subjectivity or psychical corporeality (22, emphasis in text). This embodied subjectivity or psychical corporeality highlights the fact that subject formation is a two-pronged process, involving mind and body. For Grosz, it is as if the mind and body were a Möbius strip that would infinitely twist into itself (209-210).

This connection between mind and body leads to Gail Weiss’ understanding of collective embodiment. She builds on Grosz’s contributions regarding the interdependence of mind and body to create an alternative to the model of individual subject formation that she calls intercorporeality. In Body Images: Embodiment as Intercorporeality, Weiss develops a model in which the individual becomes a subject in relation to other subjects based on Merleau-Ponty’s pioneering work on intersubjectivity in The Visible and the Invisible. For him and other philosophers in the phenomenological tradition, the individual becomes a subject through a relationship with the object. In other words, the subject depends on its sensual relationships with the objects that surround it to develop a sense of self, and becomes an individual subject through relationships with objects. Thus, for Merleau-Ponty, through the visible, the “things” that one sees, one becomes a subject (132-6). In Weiss’ case, a similar process occurs as a subject uses its senses to relate with its fellow subjects, and create a body image through this relationship. Weiss thus proposes using the term “intercorporeality” to model a subject’s formation as an exchange between bodies and body images (3); she later emphasizes that this movement destabilizes a particular ideal (92).

Weiss’ intercorporeality and Grosz’s understanding of embodied subjectivity set the groundwork for a theory of collective, embodied subjectivity. However, I require greater vocabulary to explore the potential relationship between systemic oppression, the collective and social transformation in Revueltas, Rulfo, Castellanos and Leñero. Here disability and queer theorist Jasbir K. Puar proves helpful. Like Weiss, Puar revisits the notion of how bodies become subjects in relation to other subjects, but Puar does so primarily by rereading Gilles Deleuze and

Félix Guattari’s term “assemblage.” Deleuze and Guattari conceived of the assemblage as:

a multiplicity… One side of a machinic assemblage faces the strata, which doubtless

make it a kind of organism, or signifying totality, or determination attributable to a

subject; it also has a side facing a body without organs, which is continually dismantling

the organism, causing asignifying particles or pure intensities to pass or circulate, and

attributing to itself subjects that it leaves with nothing more than a name as the trace of an

intensity. (4, emphasis in text)18

In Puar’s understanding, bodies come together and dissipate as assemblages “through intensifications and vulnerabilities, insistently rendering bare the instability of the divisions between capacity-endowed and debility-laden bodies” (Puar “Prognosis Time” 169). Her insistence on debility-laden and capacity-endowed bodies coming together connects to characters’ unusual and deformed bodies in the texts I analyze. For Puar, these encounters, which she understands as moments of conviviality, “are rarely comfortable mergers but rather entail forms of eventness that could potentially unravel oneself but just as quickly be recuperated

18 Elizabeth Grosz’s Volatile Bodies and Gail Weiss’ Body Images also deal with Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of a body without organs. Here I mention the body without organs, which serves as the theoretical underpinning for Puar’s work, to contextualize my later remarks.

23 through a restabilized self, so that the political transformation is invited” (“Prognosis Time”

169). Puar recognizes that moments of encounter are potentially disarming but also create the possibility for transformation: they can lead to something “other than what we might have hoped for,” which can include dissolution and self-annihilation (“Prognosis Time” 169). Puar’s rereading of the Deleuzian assemblage and her notion of conviviality suggest that bodies come together to reveal the fiction of difference. This term carries a time limit, which highlights the lived nature of communal action, while at the same time acknowledging the potential for destruction.

This dissertation is informed by Puar’s definition; yet, Puar’s understanding of annihilation involves the disappearance of all subjects, and so I do not completely adopt her point of view. It instead proposes that each image of a collective body, such as the group of pilgrims in Rulfo’s “Talpa” that move as if they were one body, the deathbed scene in Revueltas’

“La frontera increíble” and healing in Leñero’s El evangelio de Lucas Gavilán, can be thought of as an assemblage that provides an example of conviviality. In each case, the collective body reflects its context, both its potential for destruction and the potential for change. Campesino or wage-labourer characters, who would tend to exert less individual autonomy in the Mexican context, become part of a collective body that reflects its historical situation and may work to change it. The novels and short stories thus present groups of characters whose members never had the opportunity to become individual subjects at the same time that they present the potential for transformation through collective action. The tension between Mexican literary texts that on the one hand present the potential for social transformation through a collective body, and on the other hand, a political and historical reality that in many ways never allowed those participating in this collective social change to exert individual autonomy, is central to my study.

This dissertation is ordered chronologically. It begins by exploring four stories by José

Revueltas, “Dios en la tierra,” “El hijo tonto,” “¿Cuánta será la oscuridad?” and “La frontera increíble” from Dios en la tierra (1944) and Dormir en tierra (1960). In each story, I consider the historical context, that is, the beginning of the “Mexican Miracle,” and the stories’ portrayal of the relationship between the Church, the family, the State, intellectuals, the medical system and shifting narrative structure, and the characters’ bodies. I propose that these entities and their representatives exert power through violent acts that destroy individual subjects and create monsters and mobs. These include the campesino mob, affiliated with the land and the Church, that murdered the teacher in “Dios en la tierra.” I read these links between characters as intercorporeal experiences or moments of conviviality, which, in accordance with Revueltas’ political views and goals, reflect their historical and political context and offer an example of transformation.

I then turn to four of Juan Rulfo’s stories, “Nos han dado la tierra,” “Macario,” “Talpa” and “Luvina,” from his 1953 collection El llano en llamas, published somewhat later in the

“Mexican Miracle,” but hearkening to a non-chronological almost timeless rural existence. These stories point to power vested in the Church, traditional family structure and landholding patterns, and point to the struggle between campesinos and representatives of the government, such as land reform officials in “Nos han dado la tierra” and a teacher in “Luvina.” The land also exerts impressive power over characters, particularly through the presence of animals and the animalization of human characters in “Macario.” For instance, insects overtake the protagonist’s room; elsewhere, the story compares two female characters to a frog and a toad. My reading suggests that both the presence of the land indoors, and the likeness to animals, point to the

25 land’s oppressive nature. Nevertheless, we see the potential for transformation in the collective entities that arise from the characters’ repeatedly dehumanizing experiences.

The third chapter examines Castellanos’ novel Oficio de tinieblas (1962), which conflates an indigenous uprising from the 19th century and early 20th century land reform. I situate the novel in relation to its context of production, the 1960s, and argue that representatives of the

Church, the government and traditional landholding structure, such as priests, bureaucrats and male property owners, interpellate indigenous and female characters as collective bodies. At the same time as these characters “become” their biology, their bodies are instrumental to their challenge to the Church, the landownership system and the government. This challenge takes place as indigenous characters participate in indigenous religious ceremonies and through intertextual connections between female characters that form what I call supplementary or prosthetic maternal relationships.

My final chapter considers Vicente Leñero’s El evangelio de Lucas Gavilán (1979), within a context where the Mexican government no longer holds the country together. It reads the novel’s formal adaptation of the Gospel of Luke as a representation of oppression and an opportunity for resistance. The text presents repetitive miracles, through which I see the creation of a figurative collective body based on the body of a re-imagined Jesus figure. This character,

Jesucristo Gómez, invites the characters he heals into an alternative to the Catholic narrative.

Revueltas, Rulfo, Castellanos and Leñero’s literary works uphold collective bodies in different ways and to different degrees; each of their novels and short stories demonstrates how powerful entities in each text prevent individual subject formation, and foster the creation of collective entities. This analysis reinterprets a Mexican context that denied individual autonomy to most people to re-imagine literary situations where characters “take advantage” of this negated

26 individuality to collectively push to transform their situations, be they poorly administered land reform, teachers imposed by the government, rigid family structure or corruption in the Mexican government and the Catholic Church.

1 A Blind Response to Power: José Revueltas’ Short Stories A Catholic mob attacks a group of Protestants in José Revueltas’ short story “¿Cuánta será la oscuridad?” The mob leader’s eyes turn white while the mob gives the Protestants horrific wounds. As the story depicts this fictional attack, it explores the Protestant leader’s myopia, which mirrors the mob leader’s eyes, how the mob affects the Protestant characters’ bodies and the way these characters’ bodies in turn mimic the surrounding desert’s cacti. Lengthy descriptions in “¿Cuánta será la oscuridad?” highlight the characters’ corporeality, so that they appear to have no interiority, and such similar language is used to describe each character’s suffering, that the story appears to reduce their individuality. I propose that the story’s emphasis on the characters’ blindness and embodiment dehumanizes the characters and points towards religious oppression. I also read connections between the characters’ experiences, and interpret these connections as a gesture towards resistance.

Embodied descriptions of individual characters, a repeated emphasis on blindness and the presence of mobs in three of Revueltas’ other shorts stories illustrate the repressive nature of powerful entities in Mexico.19 At the same time, these stories show a way for weaker characters to join together to resist the strong. I build on existing criticism, which acknowledges the tragedy in Revueltas’ literary work, to propose that embodied descriptions of characters in Revueltas’ stories illustrate oppression and point towards social transformation. These short stories, “Dios en la tierra” (1941), “El hijo tonto” (1944) and “La frontera increíble” (1946), like “¿Cuánta será

19 Nocturno en que todo se oye: José Revueltas ante la crítica, edited by Edith Negrín, presents this vision of Revueltas’ work. See for example Andrea Revueltas’ “José Revueltas: política y literatura.”

28 la oscuridad?” (1944), represent violent confrontations between the Mexican government, intellectuals, the Church, family structure, the medical system and Mexican people.20

“Dios en la tierra” offers a fictionalized version of the Cristero War, a 1926 to 1929 conflict between the Mexican government and the Catholic Church. This story represents a group of townspeople, aligned with the Church, who confront their town’s teacher and a group of soldiers, who are allied with the government. This fictional confrontation culminates when the townspeople crucify their teacher after he shows the soldiers their well. “¿Cuánta será la oscuridad?” portrays the physical and mental states of a group of Protestants after they have been violently attacked by a mob of Catholics.21 “El hijo tonto” muses on the end of the world from the perspective of a sick woman, Mariana. It describes her illness’ effects on her husband Jacinto and her son Jaimito. Finally, “La frontera increíble” describes a deathbed scene from the

22 perspective of the dying man, his mother, his wife and his siblings.

This chapter situates Revueltas’ stories in their historical and political context, which corresponds to the beginning of the “Mexican Miracle” of economic development and modernization (1940-1968). The chapter analyzes the stories’ representations of powerful

20 A manuscript marker indicates “El hijo tonto” was written in 1938, and it first appeared in print in 1944 (“Apéndice bibliográfico,” Dios en la tierra 175) and “La frontera increíble” was written in 1945, although it was first published in 1946 (“Apéndice bibliográfico,” Dormir en tierra 132). 21 Ángel Arias claims that “¿Cuánta será la oscuridad?” also represents the Cristero War. He conceives of the mob of persecutors as a group of Cristeros attacking defenceless soldiers (75-80). This representation of Protestant- Catholic conflict could allude to Catholic-Protestant violence, which was common in Mexico in the 1920s and 1930s, and exacerbated by the Guerra de los Cristeros (Miller 21). The story uses Protestants because in 19th and early 20th century Latin American, they tended to be connected to urban centres and liberal ideas (Thakkar 68), which threatened Catholic, conservative, and rural areas, such as the Central and Northern Mexican desert. For further information about Protestants in Latin America in this time period see Jean-Pierre Bastian, “Protestantism in Latin America.” 22 Unless otherwise specified, all citations in parentheses in this chapter relating to the stories “Dios en la tierra,” “¿Cuánta será la oscuridad?” and “El hijo tonto” come from José Revueltas’ Dios en la tierra (1944, Mexico City: Era, 1979). “La frontera increíble” is a repeated title in Revueltas’ work; the story I study in this chapter is found in Dormir en tierra (1960, Mexico City: Era, 1978). A short story by the same name appears in Las cenizas, a posthumous collection of Revueltas’ work (Mexico City: Era, 1981).

29 entities in Mexico, such as the Church, the government, the medical system, intellectuals and family structure, and the way that characters who represent them, such as priests, teachers, doctors and mothers, affect other characters’ bodies. I argue that as both groups of characters are blind, blinded or reduced to mass bodies, their bodies act independently of their minds and become almost unrecognizable as human referents, as they appear to have no “interiority” or

“psychology.” As such, they serve as a metaphor for the effects of oppressive entities in Mexico.

At the same time, as the characters become mobs, and, in other cases, evoke one another through imagery of blindness, myopia and lost eyesight, they can be seen as an intertextual, collective, entity. I posit that this collective entity symbolically challenges the Church, the government, medicine, intellectuals and the family within the context of Revueltas’ stories. By focusing on the relationship between powerful entities, characters’ bodies, oppression and resistance, my analysis brings together theories of power, corporeality and collective change into conversation with one another and with Revueltas’ work.

I begin by developing a theory of power in relation to these stories, in particular, by exploring how power was divided between the Mexican government and other powerful entities in the 1940s and 1950s. I then describe the ways that the Mexican State sought to promote itself as the primary power in Mexico by creating intellectual institutions, forging alliances with the

Church, removing the connections between motherhood and the Church and promoting medical discourse. By focussing on the ways that characters’ bodies lose their individual features, become blind, or undergo the same experiences of violence, the chapter illustrates the oppressive nature of these powerful structures in Mexico. I conclude by drawing on Revueltas’ political writing and theories of assemblage to read resistance in these characters’ de-individualized bodies.

1.1 Understanding Power in Dios en la tierra and Dormir en tierra Revueltas’ stories, set in post-Revolutionary Mexico, portray conflicts between the

Mexican government, intellectuals, the Church, families and the medical system. As these stories center on conflicts between the State and other entities, they suggest that the Mexican government is not the sole source of power in Mexico. Revueltas’ work, from an Althusserian perspective, suggests that the State apparatus of police, courts, prisons and the army is not the only machine of repression that ensures the domination of the ruling classes in Mexico over other classes (Althusser 137). In Mexico in the 1940s and 1950s, the State competed with other entities to be able to subject Mexicans to its ideology.

In Revueltas’ stories, as representatives of the State, intellectual structures, as the Church, families and the medical system clash, they mark characters’ bodies. In this way, the presence of mass bodies, blindness, a deathbed scene and a monstrous pregnancy in selected short stories from Dios en la tierra and Dormir en tierra follow what literary critic Bruno Bosteels observes with regards to Revueltas’ 1964 novel Los errores. Bosteels proposes that rage, hatred and resentment in this novel are “the indispensable anchoring points that mark the subordination of a body to power, violence and exploitation” (60). The characters’ unusual physical experiences in

Revueltas’ short stories thus also mark their subordination to power.

Althusser’s concepts of the State and Ideological State Apparatuses prove useful when labeling these powers in Revueltas’ stories; at the same time, power in these stories follows a

Foucauldian understanding of power dynamics. The government and the Church exert power through associated medical, intellectual and familial ISAs. Representations of the government, which I also identify as the State, exert power over its representatives in the stories, teachers and soldiers. In “¿Cuánta será la oscuridad?” an intellectual figure, the pastor, subjugates his

31 followers. His ruminations remind us of conflicts among Mexican intellectuals in the 1920s and

1930s, and the Mexican government’s struggle to institutionalize knowledge throughout the

1940s. This pastor and his followers are dominated by a religious ISA, the Protestant Church, which confronts representatives of the primary religious ISA in Mexico, the Catholic Church. In this story, the Catholic mob acts violently towards Protestants, in part because they have chosen not to participate in the Catholic religious group. The way the Catholics violate the Protestants’ bodies and the Protestants’ subsequent flight to the desert, moreover, remind us of Agamben’s description of bare life. He tells us that this is a life stripped of every right that can only be saved

“in perpetual flight or a foreign land” (Agamben 103). These characters’ bodies thus show us how Catholic religious power interpellates its representatives as a destructive mob that subjugates others and condemns them to flight. In “Dios en la tierra” and “La frontera increíble,” the Catholic hierarchy exerts power over others, in the former, interpellating rural characters as a stone-like collective, in the latter, leading them to repeat prayers and cross themselves in response to a man’s death. Familial structures often find their roots in the Church, and subject female characters throughout Revueltas’ stories. The stories also feminize masculine characters, which disempowers them in their context. “El hijo tonto” shows how the medical gaze, from the eyes of a doctor onto a sick character, Mariana, gives Mariana a specific label, tuberculosis.

Rural characters are also covered in dust, and turn into a blind white mob in “Dios en la tierra.”

At the same time, I read these blinded, wounded or mob-like characters as assemblages that suggest violent resistance and transformation. I use Puar’s interpretation of Deleuze and

Guattari’s “assemblage,” because Puar’s version ties an amorphous collective to repression, violence and the possibility for change, three themes that come to light in Revueltas’ work. Puar uses the term, which on the one hand emphasizes a totality and on the other hand stresses the replaceability of the group’s components, to argue that assemblages lead to conviviality, an

32 opportunity for self-annihilation and for transformation (“Prognosis Time” 169). I thus view the intertextual and intercorporeal connections between annihilated characters in Revueltas’ stories as a metaphorical assemblage that points towards transformation.

1.1.1 Revueltas’ Stories in Relation to the Institutionalizing Mexican State These theories of power must be understood in reference to the stories’ historical context.

Revueltas’ short stories were published between 1941 and 1946, a period of literary production that corresponds with the “Mexican Miracle.” Not for the first time, the Mexican government promoted a discourse of progress that aimed to create an urban, industrial and modern country.23

Under president Manuel Ávila Camacho (1940-1946), the political party in power, the Mexican

Revolutionary Party (PRM), re-interpreted history so as to establish itself as the undeniable heir or complete fulfillment of the Mexican Revolution (Aguilar Camín and L. Meyer 191, 194). The

PRM also aligned itself with the business classes, and, although it paid lip service to land reform and destroying the latifundio (large estate) system, its office of private property made so many errors that those under the collective ejido system found that their land ownership was precarious

(Agustín Tragicomedia mexicana 1 54).

In 1946, the PRM renamed and reconceived of itself as the Institutional Revolutionary

Party (PRI). This signalled that the Party now explicitly affiliated itself with the State institutions it was in the process of creating. Under president Miguel Alemán (1946-1952), the PRI consolidated power by cultivating favour from others or by creating likeminded organizations.

For instance, after the 1946 elections, the PRI gave some seats to the leading national opposition party, the National Action Party (PAN), but not to any of Mexico’s socialist or communist

23 Porfirio Díaz promoted a similar discourse under his tenure, which lasted from 1876 to 1911.

33 parties. The PRI also influenced workers and campesinos, in other words, most Mexicans, by sponsoring the Confederación de Trabajadores Mexicanos (CTM) and the Consejo Nacional

Campesino (CNC) (Revueltas México, una democracia bárbara 62-3). At a regional level, PRI- affiliated governments worked with CTM and CNC leaders such as Vicente Lombardo Toledano to sponsor local subsidiaries. In Sinaloa, a state that encompasses a landscape not unlike the desert in which Revueltas’ stories are set, the federal government created the Sociedad de Interés

Colectivo Agrícola y Ejidal (SICAE) for Sinaloans (“Permanent Display”). This organization controlled the campesinos’ relationship with the PRI and ensured that agrarian reform was carried out to the Party’s satisfaction (“Permanent Display”). Through these relationships and organizations, then, the PRI became the primary structure of governmental power in Mexico, and reinforced this power through associated structures such as prisons and courts. An excerpt from

Revueltas’ diary during his imprisonment in the Lecumberri jail illuminates the effects of this government on at least one individual. He tells us: “[u]n dato esencial de la cárcel: la menor valía del individuo. Todo tiende a esto, a partir de su designio puro. La mediatización de la libertad.

Entonces el individuo reacciona en la menor valía del otro” (México 68 249, emphasis in text).

An essential part of the prison system was ensuring that each prisoner saw his fellow prisoners as worthless. By extension, the government would ensure that individuals, or institutions, were so embedded in its system that they would see others as worthless.

The soldiers in “Dios en la tierra,” employed by the government, are fictional representations that demonstrate how the State repressed Mexicans during the Cristero War and the stories’ context of production. In this story, the soldiers’ repeated “rostros morenos de tierra labrantía, tiernos y unos gestos de niños inconscientemente crueles” suggest sameness (12). The story adds that they wear similar clothes: “zapatones claveteados…su miserable color olivo…cantimploras vacías y hambrientos” (12, 13). Their “labios cenizos,” “frentes imposibles”

34 and similar clothes (12-14), which create the impression of a single representative found in several bodies that acts on State power, can then subjugate the Mexicans not yet involved in the

State’s projects. The soldiers further lose their individuality in this story as they converge through their single desire for water. “Dios en la tierra” tells us this thirst takes the form of a river, a stream or a well (14). In this way, we see that the soldiers’ thoughts as well as their bodies become almost interchangeable with one another. These characters do not exercise individual autonomy, and so, they become a collective entity.

The PRI thus increased its power within Mexico by creating collective entities it could repress, such as a post-Revolutionary army we see in “Dios en la tierra.” The Party also enhanced its power on an international level by developing a closer relationship with the US. In

1941, Mexico followed the US and entered World War II as an Allied power and the US government encouraged Mexicans to migrate to fill in gaps in the US labour force. After the war ended, Mexico, with US assistance, became a member of the international community and joined the UN and the Organization of American States (OAS) (Aguilar Camín and L. Meyer 195-6).24

As the PRI’s new economic and foreign policies granted economic growth to large sectors of

Mexico, the PRI was able to justify its continued power. Revueltas’ literary work does not directly allude to these international political machinations, although his political writing does not shy away from critiquing the Mexican government.25

24 This relationship strongly influenced President Alemán’s economic decisions. In 1947, for instance, he attempted to avoid inflation by encouraging production, giving industry credits, lowering taxes and severely controlling the workforce (Agustín Tragicomedia mexicana 1 83). Then, when the businesses complained that Alemán’s salary revisions and price controls were too generous with workers, political and cultural commentator José Agustín observes that the president gave companies even more concessions (Tragicomedia mexicana 1 83). 25 Revueltas’ novel Los motivos de Caín (1957) describes the experiences of a Mexican-American army deserter in Los Angeles, Tijuana and the Korean War, and thus alludes to this context.

Between the 1940s and the 1960s, as the Mexican economy developed, the population tripled and many moved to urban areas (Aboites Aguilar 275; Aguilar Camín and L. Meyer 206-

7). The small group in control of most of the country’s wealth considered the resulting urban poverty to be merely a cost of progress. “El hijo tonto” explores internationalization’s corresponding urbanization and urban poverty.26 Its narrator describes a family’s impoverished home: “[e]l piso estaba lleno de polvo, de basuras y tierra de la calle” (100); lit by “una vela que chisporroteaba, ondulante, caprichosa” (96). The story reinforces its criticism through temporal and modal shifts, indicating that if the family’s situation were to change, the world would end.

“Bien que Jacinto ya había salido de casa, con toda seguridad a buscar trabajo; si lo encontraba terminaría todo al instante” (98, emphasis mine). This non-paradigmatic “si” clause exchanges the paradigmatic imperfect subjunctive for the non-paradigmatic and perhaps more objective imperfect indicative to imply that should Jacinto’s joblessness end, so might the world, as the family knew it.27 The text further creates a sense of doubt and confusion by contrasting doubt and certainty, pointing to the insecurity of this family and others in their situation. A paragraph begins with the phrase “[q]uizá haya amanecido, aunque sería muy arriesgado afirmar nada sobre la lluvia y el sol” (97). Immediately after doubting the possibility of sunrise, and asserting the risk of commenting on the rain and the sun, the paragraph’s next two sentences begin with the affirmation “cierto que” (97). These narrative techniques demonstrate that urbanization created insecure situations for many people, and suggest that Mexico’s entire future might be insecure.

26 Mexican literature from many time periods criticizes progress, such as turn-of-the-twentieth-century novels that explore some of the effects of the Porfiriato’s modernizing ventures (Brushwood Mexico in its Novel 207; 227). 27 “El hijo tonto” uses paradigmatic structures elsewhere.

1.1.2 Intellectual Structures in Mexico and Revueltas’ Critique Throughout the “Mexican Miracle,” Mexican writers, artists and other intellectuals, like

Revueltas, responded to their political and historical context, commenting on this increasing insecurity. In the 1920s and 1930s, the Mexican State promoted a nationalistic project at the same time as the Mexican cultural and literary sphere was defining itself. Two key debates, in

1925 and 1932, illustrate the tensions between the State and the literary sphere in Mexico.

The debate of 1925 centered on characterizing a national literature. According to Ignacio

Sánchez Prado, this literature was to be “cruda, realista, fundada en los estrechos temas de la

Revolución” (Naciones intelectuales 37). He argues that:

[e]l uso de terminologías de género y orientación sexual y la movilización de la profunda

homofobia imperante fueron estratégicos [en este pleito]: un punto de acuerdo para borrar

del debate a aquellos que cuestionaron la posibilidad de la institucionalización cultural, a

través de la ‘literatura nacional,’ de los grupos en cuestión. (36)

This meant that some authors, such as Mariano Azuela and his 1915 novel Los de abajo, which emphasized the virile, hyper-masculine Revolutionary fighter, were lauded (Sánchez Prado

Naciones intelectuales 46). Over time, however, intellectuals began to separate themselves from official plans for the Mexican nation’s progress, a progress that was characterized through virile and homophobic language. Virreinalistas attempted to counter the influence of Revolutionary literature by looking back to the colonial period. Avant-garde movements such as the contemporáneos and the estridentistas opposed the State’s emphasis on “lo mexicano” in other ways. The estridentistas interacted directly with the public without the mediation of literary institutions (Sánchez Prado Naciones intelectuales 54-5). The contemporáneos conceived of the intellectual in an emancipatory role, maintaining that literary institutions could act as leaders for the moral dimension of society (Sánchez Prado Naciones intelectuales 80-81).

Seven years later, Mexican writers and literary critics’ disagreements over the course of post-Revolutionary Mexico came to a head, this time, as cosmopolitan or universalist intellectuals, influenced by French literature and culture, disagreed with writers exhibiting more nationalist tendencies (Sánchez Prado Naciones intelectuales 95). Sánchez Prado maintains that

Alfonso Reyes, affiliated with the contemporáneos avant-garde movement, synthesizes both sides of the debate, as Reyes argued for a national literature that would at the same time respond to universal themes (Naciones intelectuales 118). Thanks to these groups and their debates,

Mexican intellectuals appropriated universal culture in order to address and to transcend

Mexico’s particular themes and problems.

President Ávila Camacho inherited the legacy of these debates. His government created institutions for intellectuals alongside the institutions it had created for campesinos and workers, the CNC and CTM. As president, Ávila Camacho influenced the broader cultural sphere through what Sánchez Prado calls “la práctica de clientelismo que caracterizará buena parte de la cultura mexicana, a partir de un intricado sistema de becas, premios, reconocimientos” and institutions such as the Colegio de México and the Colegio Nacional (Naciones intelectuales 142). However, the government’s lack of an official cultural policy in the 1940s created space for intellectuals to critique the presidential office, the PRI and its policies. Revueltas’ novels and short stories emphasize everyday Mexicans and critique the Mexican context; yet, they deal with universal themes, so that Mexican and non-Mexican readers alike understand them.

As a communist intellectual, Revueltas is indebted to another historical process, the arrival of Spanish exiles in Mexico after the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939). Indeed, in spite of the presence of socialism in the Mexican Revolution and president Lázaro Cárdenas’ (1934-

1940) emphasis on socialist education and agrarian reform, Marxism was not a significant philosophical tendency in Mexico until the arrival of the Spanish exiles. José Gaos, a

38 philosopher, likely influenced Revueltas’ thought. According to Sánchez Prado, “[l]a llegada de

Gaos a México fue el origen de la transformación más importante del pensamiento mexicano en el siglo XX” (Naciones intelectuales 178-9). Even though Gaos read Marxism as a kind of humanism, rather than as a philosophy working towards a direct political outcome, his commitment to the realm of ideas, academics and culture, contributed to Revueltas’ intellectual development. In an essay titled “Lealtad del intelectual,” Gaos states that “[e]l papel del intelectual, esto es, del intelectual en cuanto tal, es en nuestros días como en todos, exclusivamente el ejercicio de las funciones, la práctica de las labores intelectuales…” (171).

Gaos also criticizes the intellectual who becomes involved in politics, although he asserts that some political involvement is acceptable. For Gaos, “el intelectual no puede intervenir eficazmente en política más que de una manera: pensando ideas políticas, ideando soluciones a los problemas políticos” (172).

Although a direct influence is difficult to prove, Revueltas’ understanding of the intellectual demonstrates the impact of Gaos’ ideas in Mexico. Revueltas argues that the intellectual is separate from the rest of society, “un ser complicado y astuto, torturado de la manera más increíble por el infierno de la vanidad,” and is thus quite different from “el hombre popular que golpea la mujer” (Revueltas “Posibilidades y limitaciones” 260). Revueltas lived out this critical standpoint. Because of his political affiliation with the Mexican Communist Party, and self-identification as a Marxist-Leninist militant, he suffered imprisonment in 1932 and 1934 in the Islas Marías and endured ongoing police surveillance (“A propósito” x, xxi). He experienced a second imprisonment from 1968 to 1971 in Lecumberri after he was accused of being the intellectual author of the student protests that led to the 1968 Tlatelolco Massacre.

Even in prison, he was submitted to constant vigilance, including “la intercepción y lectura de los materiales escritos” (México 68 211).28 In Lecumberri, he writes,

El hecho mismo de escribir es raro, asombroso. No sabe uno lo que significa, qué es esta

cosa de unir palabras, en un mundo, en un vacío irrespirable donde parecen haberse roto

todas ellas y no atreverse a decir lo que ha pasado, lo que designan: no es el horror sino

este vacío, esta orfandad, tantos muertos como nos rodean. (México 68 79-80)

To combat this literal and metaphysical loss, Revueltas writes in his diary. An excerpt from this time states:

escribir ya en sí mismo es una forma de la libertad, que aún sin papel ni pluma nadie nos

podría arrebatar de la cabeza a menos que nos aloje dentro de ella una buena bala con lo

que termine todo. (Revueltas “Diario”)

In this citation, we see that Revueltas was aware of the cost of being a writer with a specific commitment, in other words, that practicing communist theory had consequences.

Revueltas criticized intellectuals who ingratiated themselves with official lines of thinking or embedded themselves in the system of prizes, scholarships and cultural institutions

Ávila Camacho had created. In prison in 1971, he writes a letter to his daughter Andrea. After critiquing a number of other communist parties, he continues to advocate for the creation of a

“true” Communist Party in Mexico. To create this party, he reminds Andrea that “no debemos esperar de nadie, sino de nosotros mismos: pensar, escribir, luchar, con audacia, despojados de todo fetiche, de todo dogmatismo, no importa el punto a que lleguemos” (Las evocaciones

28 Carlos Monsiváis would agree. He outlines Revueltas’ life and politics in an article titled “Revueltas: crónica de una vida militante” (emphasis mine). Files in the Archivo General de la Nación show that police was watching him before the student protests began, from his dinner parties, activities at the UNAM to his trip to post-Revolutionary Cuba (See for example “Informe sobre José Revueltas” in the SCDFS/IPS collection).

40 requeridas II 213). In other words, for Revueltas, the intellectual was to be a committed communist whose task was thinking, writing and struggling against all forms of dogma, including the Communist Party. The committed intellectual certainly did not exist to make friends, and, if we follow Theodor Adorno’s observations in Minima Moralia, would necessarily be a solitary figure. Adorno states that “[f]or intellectuals, unswerving isolation is the only form

29 in which they can vouchsafe a measure of solidarity” (“5. Doctor that is Kind of You”).

Revueltas puts it in the following way. For him, the intellectual would ensure that “todos salgamos a la calle del mundo y miremos con sangre: nos envolvamos en las cosas, las pertenezcamos como ser colectivo y pactemos ese compromiso del hombre que es el hombre mismo” (Cuestionamientos e intenciones 122). 30 In Representations of the Intellectual, Edward

Said outlines the role of the intellectual and aptly, although inadvertently, sheds light on

Revueltas’ stance. Said posits that:

there is no dodging the inescapable reality that such representations by intellectuals with

neither make them friends in high places nor win them official honors. It is a lonely

condition, yes, but it is always a better one than a gregarious tolerance for the way things

are. (xviii)

29 Minima Moralia, written in light of the atrocities of the Second World War, serves in some ways as a precedent for Revueltas’ later statements. In fragment 132, “Expensive reproduction,” Adorno maintains that “[e]ven intellectuals who have all the political arguments against bourgeois ideology handy, are subjected to a process of standardization which, whether in crassly contrasting content or through the readiness on their part to be comfortable, brings them closer to the prevailing Spirit [Geist], such that their standpoint objectively becomes always more arbitrary, dependent on flimsy preferences or their estimation of their own chance.” 30 This citation is from the undated essay, “¿Cuál es el ‘compromiso’ de los escritores y con qué causa han de comprometerse?” According to its editors, Andrea Revueltas and Philippe Cheron, the essay was found in a box of José Revueltas’ papers from January 1964 and so they assume it is from that year (“Notas” Cuestionamientos e intenciones 344).

Following this line of thinking, in the essay “¿Cuál es el ‘compromiso’ de los escritores y con qué causa han de comprometerse?” Revueltas looks around him at existing possibilities, and sustains that these positions are insufficient for confronting reality. He first criticizes the slightly politicized writer, who assumes liberal or democratic positions, which for Revueltas include a strong anti-communist current, then he criticizes the intellectual who is sympathetic to communism without being committed to it, and finally he criticizes the communist who is prohibited from fighting for his party, especially against its “mentiras, engaños y deformaciones”

(Cuestionamientos e intenciones 121).

In contrast to other left-leaning intellectuals who only criticized the government,

Revueltas condemned the government, political parties, unions and their leaders (Revueltas

México, una democracia bárbara 21-5).31 His work argues that none of these groups represented the interests of the people and this political writing reflects a certain sense of alienation from organizations meant to foment revolution.32 According to Bosteels, an important part of this criticism was that for Revueltas, a genuine communist party could not exist “unless it finally include[d] those members of the underworld whom orthodox Marxism had always excluded under the denigrating term of lumpenproletariat” (52). In other words, for Revueltas, it was

31 The Colegio de Mexico’s series Historia de la Revolución mexicana demonstrates this type of critique. Published in the 1970s and 1980s, these well-researched volumes harshly critique the PRI machine. For further information consult Pellicer and Reyna, Pellicer de Brody and Mancilla or Medina. Nevertheless, this series favours PRI- supported unions, particularly prominent leader Vicente Lombardo Toledano (Medina 112-150). I would argue that only much later would crónicas, such as Monsiváis’ 1970 Días de guardar, and historical analyses, such as Lorenzo Meyer’s 2007 “La posrevolución en México,” approach Revueltas’ level of critique. 32 This proposal for resistance is found throughout Revueltas’ work. His 1958 México, una democracia bárbara offers a particularly scathing critique of Mexico’s then-president Ruiz Cortines (1952-1958). This essay’s critique of government, unions, radical politicians and the PRI forms part of a larger, sustained, critique of early and mid-20th century Mexican politics.

42 impossible to transform the world without paying attention to marginalized sectors. Sánchez

Prado interprets it in the following way:

José Revueltas comprendió que un frente político tenía siempre que hacerse la pregunta

por todos los sectores de la sociedad, sobre todo por los sectores más abyectos, porque

una revolución que no representara a los más desposeídos carecía de sentido. (Naciones

intelectuales 247-8)

Revueltas was in fact so critical of Mexican communism that he was asked to leave the Mexican

Communist Party (PCM) in 1943 (Escalante xxii). The Party reinstated him in 1956, but in 1960, he and other members were asked to leave, due to their subversive activities and, in Revueltas’ case, outright condemnation of Stalinism (Escalante xxii).

Standing at a distance from the Mexican intellectual context allows Revueltas and his stories to criticize intellectual culture in great depth. I read blindness, myopia and absent glasses in “¿Cuánta será la oscuridad?” and “Dios en la tierra” as metaphors for the institutionalization of culture in Mexico and as analogous to Revueltas’ own critique of intellectuals who exhibited liberal-democratic ideas, while sympathizing with communism without commitment and members of the Communist Party.

The teacher in “Dios en la tierra,” for instance, demonstrates the uncertain role of the intellectual in the context of a modernizing Mexico. In this story, a fictional account of the

Cristero War, a group of rural characters are willing to defend their water, women and way of life at any cost.33 When a group of soldiers arrive in the town because its teacher has offered to

33 In this conflict between the Mexican Church and the Mexican government, those who supported the Church were known as Cristeros, and fought federal soldiers throughout Mexico, particularly in the Central Mexican states of Guanajuato, Jalisco and Zacatecas. These states include desert-like terrain, similar to the area where “Dios en la

43 show them a well, the townspeople crucify the teacher. Indeed, by confronting the teacher, they confronted the education system; this system, according to historian Mary Kay Vaughan, attacked campesino “superstition, religious practices, and the church” (5). In this context, she notes that the teacher was “an explicitly political actor” (6). Indeed, in the 1930s in Mexico, teachers:

were instructed to organize peasants and workers to press for the implementation of

federal agrarian and labor laws that would effect a redistribution of wealth and power.

President Cárdenas hailed them as the vanguard in his massive land reform program.

(Vaughan 6)

In the text, the teacher is so fearful of his impending death, that his heart beats almost of its own accord and his individual, persecuted, sad and exhausted body confronts the eyeless, lipless, faceless and monstrous townspeople (16). The story then adds that the teacher is blind with anguish and his eyes are lost in space (16). In this way, as he is crucified, he mirrors the townspeople in the story, who are described as an eyeless mass (16), an imitation that suggests that he will never again interfere with the town’s way of life. This representation of an historic conflict critiques the State’s influence over teachers, demonstrates that their task was difficult if not impossible and parallels Revueltas’ understanding of the way that the state co-opted intellectuals into its institutions in the 1940s. The rural characters attempt to control the teacher

tierra” is set. This story could also respond to the 1932-1938 conflict between rural people and the government, during which the government sought to impose a new sexual education curriculum (J. Meyer “Una idea de México” 26-7). This second uprising led to renewed guerrilla fighting, which killed 100 teachers, injured 200 more, and destroyed many schools (J. Meyer “Una idea de México” 28-9). An article in the Ministry of Education’s periodical El Maestro Rural discusses one such assassination. It describes a teacher, Juan Manuel Espinosa, interested in the area’s progress, and shot by two men with the entire town of Toxhié, Mexico State, as witnesses (Ramírez 1).

44 so that he is unable to see, which is not unlike the way that the government attempted to enlist intellectuals in its project through prizes and other forms of recognition. Once the government’s control was complete, intellectuals became “unable to see” or critique their situation. Using

Revueltas’ terminology, I would argue that “Dios en la tierra” is analogous to the idea that the

State neutralizes “liberal-democratic” intellectuals through its institutions, and those communist intellectuals so committed to their own political party, so that they can no longer interfere with either the government’s or their political party’s plans for the country’s future.

The intellectual figure in “¿Cuánta será la oscuridad?” a Protestant pastor, can be seen as analogous to Revueltas’ critique of communist intellectuals. This story, which describes the mental and physical states of a group of Protestants after they have been violently attacked by a group of Catholics, is told primarily from the Protestant pastor’s perspective. The pastor is unable to see, and the story associates his felt nakedness with his sense of powerlessness and his lost sight with lost knowledge. The story describes the group and their leader in the following way. “El pastor ya no era un hombre de Dios, sino un ser desnudo y sin potestad, y todos estaban desnudos frente a sus propias vidas” (166). We learn that in the attack, the pastor’s glasses, which had been attached around his neck by a cord of some kind, were ripped from his body.

These lost glasses and the string from which they hung trace a bloody ring around the pastor’s neck (166). The story implies that this ring of blood leaves a metaphorical mark as well: we learn that the pastor’s vision is so reduced without his glasses that he prefers to keep his eyes closed

(165). Blindness and spiritual nakedness thus distort the pastor’s sight and prevent him from seeing what is around him. In reading this figure as analogous to Revueltas’ commentary on intellectuals in the Mexican context, we can associate the pastor’s loss of sight with the idea that

Mexican intellectuals, even those communists who oppose the government, are not sufficiently

45 critical. In other words, the potentially provocative intellectual is neutralized so that he cannot raise people’s consciousness.

I read another figure in this story, the leader of the Catholic mob, as analogous to

Revueltas’ critique of the liberal democratic intellectual who may attempt to hide fascist or anti- communist beliefs. We learn that the mob leader’s eyes were “blancos y sin pupilas, larga y profundamente ciegos” (169). In this way, the story follows what Moshe Barasch identifies as one of the ways blindness is understood in Western culture, as an outward manifestation of a person’s inner qualities (23). While Barasch notes that blindness has sometimes been tied to wisdom and purity, in other cases, such as Christian narratives of conversion, blindness points out ignorance, and the sight that follows this conversion, illumination (55). Critic Jorge

Ruffinelli reinforces this notion of blindness in relation to ignorance. He suggests that in Dios en la tierra, deformities in body and soul almost always correspond with one another (Ruffinelli

78). In “¿Cuánta será la oscuridad?”, then, the mob leader’s blindness reinforces his evil nature, and is similar to Revueltas’ critique of the liberal-democratic intellectual who hides his fascist or anti-communist tendencies.

In both stories, intellectual figures fail. They do not raise anyone’s consciousness, the marginalized do not become part of their project and they do not enact permanent change in education, health or religion. They are much closer to Revueltas’ critique than to his vision of an intellectual or a writer. For this reason, these characters underscore the need for the critical, committed and communist intellectual, that is, someone who would work towards creating a

Marxist workers party that would neutralize political opportunism and work on behalf of the people (México, una democracia bárbara 25). In accordance with Sánchez Prado, although

Revueltas’ political ideals are not fully developed in his fiction, Revueltas’ literary work does point towards these ideals (“Bienaventurados los marginados porque ellos recibirán la

46 redención” 173). Perhaps, reading with Patrícia Vieira’s interpretation of blindness in Ibero-

American fiction, the teacher, the pastor and the mob leader’s blindness, myopia and white eyes could “become enabling conditions of possibility for a rethinking of existing socio-political structures and for imagining new forms of collective life” (39). Thus, these similar experiences of blindness in intellectual figures in “Dios en la tierra” and “¿Cuánta será la oscuridad?” as well as the absent ideal intellectual allow us to rethink existing intellectual structures.

1.1.3 The Catholic Church in Revueltas’ Stories Although “¿Cuánta será la oscuridad?” alludes to religious conflict between Protestants and Catholics, in the 1940s, the vast majority of Mexicans were Catholic. In spite of this religious monopoly, the Catholic Church was struggling to find ways to exert power in the country. The post-Revolutionary 1917 Mexican Constitution had severely limited the powers of the Catholic Church in Mexico. In the face of these restrictions, Mexican bishops suspended mass for three years, an action that led to the Cristero War we saw represented in “Dios en la tierra.” Indeed, in the 20th century, the Church could only influence Mexicans by subordinating itself to the State and its apparatuses. A report published in Advocate of Peace through Justice, regarding the 1929 peace agreement between then-President Portes Gil and Mexican Archbishop

Leopoldo Ruiz, which marked the end of the Cristero War, demonstrates this confluence of power. The report quotes the archbishop:

I entertain the hope that resumption of religious services may lead the Mexican people,

animated by a spirit of mutual good-will, to cooperate in all moral efforts made for the

benefit of all people of our fatherland. Hitherto efforts to reach an understanding between

the Church and the State have broken down on the question of the government’s demand

that a minister, to exercise his functions, must register in his municipality. This difficulty

has now been definitely removed. (279-80)

This statement, as well as the presidential response’s emphasis, which emphasizes education and the request that religious orders register with the government, completely ignores the experiences of Mexican Cristeros and soldiers during the war. Portes Gil’s statement also inadvertently implies both the Church and the State had taken advantage of poverty and ignorance first to start and then to end a civil war that ignored the needs of Mexican people and reduced them to what

Agamben would call bare life. That is, by enlisting Mexican people in their projects, both Church and State stripped away the soldiers and Cristeros’ rights. Although the soldiers did not have to flee, which would conform further to Agamben’s theory, they did have to go to unfamiliar parts of Mexico, or, in the case of the Cristeros, they remained hermetically sealed in their homes and home states with no way out. The Archbishop’s choice of “moral efforts for our fatherland,” moreover, implies that the Church voluntarily subordinated itself to the State, and embedded itself in the State’s machinations by fashioning itself as the moral compass for the secular country. In this way, this report demonstrates the collusion between the two powers.

Paralleling the convergence and tension between the Church and State, the characters’ bodies in “Dios en la tierra” and “¿Cuánta será la oscuridad?” exhibit blindness, make a

Cyclopean God in their image and acquire the appearance of their surroundings; “La frontera increíble” uses abject imagery surrounding a deathbed scene to demonstrate the outcome of a blind system of religious power. This critique of Church and State relates to the co-existence of

Marxism and Christian imagery in Revueltas’ thinking. Indeed, according to critic Álvaro Ruiz

Abreu, for Revueltas, God was a historical and social entity (188), which means that for

Revueltas, God, and by extension, religion, can only be understood as a function of its historical and social context. Thus, Revueltas’ stories use religious imagery, rooted in mid-twentieth century Mexico, to critique their situation.

“Dios en la tierra” emphasizes the town’s closed-off and stony nature and describes a

God made in the townspeople’s image. In the story, “[l]a población estaba cerrada con odio y con piedras. Cerrada completamente como si sobre sus puertas y ventanas se hubieran colocado lápidas enormes, sin dimensión de tan profundas, de tan gruesas, de tan de Dios” (11). God’s cruelty, vengefulness and perversity challenge the Christian view of a loving God. Moreover, as

Sánchez Prado argues, the teacher who offers the soldiers water, the only character in the story who performs a Christian act, is violently punished for his charity (“Bienaventurados los pobres”

157). The story adds to this challenge by giving a Cyclopean God “un solo ojo en la mitad de la frente” (15).34 The story strives to limit the all-knowing God by giving him only one eye; still, rather than limiting God’s power, this narrows God’s vision, reinforces a sense of God’s cruelty and divine punishment, and justifies the town’s reactionary behaviour. Through this vision of

God, we see how the religious ISA interpellates the townspeople as a collective, reactionary, subject.

This Cyclopean God also holds power over the mob of Catholics in “¿Cuánta será la oscuridad?” The mob’s anger freezes them: “tenían el rostro completamente pálido y cómo [sic] la voz ya no era suya” (165). It is as if this pallor is what allows them to commit what the story describes as extraordinarily cold and unimaginably cruel acts (167). This mob exerts power over the Protestants, and the Catholic religious fervour makes the Protestants flee their homes to escape their attackers. Their myopic leader then begins to evoke the one-eyed God in “Dios en la tierra.” The pastor sees his flock as “manchas casi deshumanizantes” even though he knew that they were, like him, “seres de carne y hueso y con vida” (165). Through the pastor’s myopic

34 José Ramón Enríquez’s “Dios, Cristo y Cíclope en la obra de Revueltas” deals specifically with these figures and Helia A. Sheldon’s Mito y desmitificación en José Revueltas analyzes archetypal and mythological imagery in Revueltas’ oeuvre.

49 reflections, the Protestants’ “patria de magueyes, patria colérica, patria espesa, con su desesperado cielo” becomes more human than them as the cacti, which sat, “encogidos, herméticos, como animales humanos y a la vez vegetales,” have more defining and human characteristics than the Protestants (167). Blind religious power dehumanizes the Catholic mob, their Protestant victims and both leaders.

Similarly, the townspeople in “Dios en la tierra” are presented as a “masa blanca” (15-

16). They acquire the appearance of rocks, the most brutal, inorganic matter, and are said to change as quickly as the “inmensas piedras del mundo [que] cambian de sitio, avanzan un milímetro por siglo” (11). These rock-like humans become an animal as they acquire the “rostro ennegrecido de animales duros,” “una masa nacida en la furia, horrorosamente falta de ojos, sin labios, sólo con un rostro inmutable, imperecedero, donde no había más que un golpe, un trueno, una palabra oscura, ‘Cristo Rey’” (15). Their one-eyed God thus appears to reduce them to a compact, ugly, brutal mass that protects itself at all costs. This mass body challenges the image of the body of Christian believers where people contribute based on their gifts (Acts 2:44-45), and the popular communist slogan, “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need.” This mass thus shows that dehumanizing religious ideas powerfully affect rural people.

“La frontera increíble” demonstrates that Catholicism dehumanized its own clergy. In this story, a priest sent to perform Extreme Unction or Last Rites for a dying man cannot follow the prescribed narrative and the ritual of Extreme Unction becomes “extrañísima, torpe, llena de disgusto y contrariedad para todos” (37). It follows that the priest begins the ritual by blessing the room with an “ademán impreciso” (37). He forms a potential prayer in his mind that he does not share with the dying man or his family. “Todos los días –se dijo–, en todas partes de la tierra mueren los hombres. No hay un segundo en el tiempo en que no se produzca una muerte. Recibe,

Dios inmenso, esos espíritus en tu seno” (38). After mentally performing the ritual, the priest

50 fails to offer the sacrament to the dying man, refuses to hear his confession and anoints him with oil. The sacrament of Extreme Unction is thus reduced to “el sacramento de los óleos santos”

(37) and the priest is implicitly reduced to the idiomatic expression “un cura de misa y olla,” which suggests he had little education and less training for his role. The priest’s own exaggerated embodiment confirms this notion. He wears a filthy stole over a black corduroy shirt with worn- out elbows (37). The stole’s golden threads, as if acting of their own accord, “se metieron en la bacinica infecta que estaba a un lado de la cama” (38). When the priest attempts to remove the stole from the bedpan, “su asco y su vergüenza fueron horribles por ser él mismo un hombre capaz de pudrirse, de tener pus y arrojar deyecciones” (38). The juxtaposition between the priest and the bedpan demonstrates the Church’s discomfort with the human body.35 The story highlights the Church’s discomfort with the body by creating a closer link between the priest’s smell and the dying man. “Después de que se hubo retirado, el sacerdote dejó un olor que se conservaba en el aire. Un olor a cera y a naftalina” (37). Then, when the oil refuses to enter the protagonist’s body, the story further denigrates the priest’s abilities. “El aceite en los párpados, en los labios, en las manos, en las plantas del moribundo […] parecía algo como enfriado desde muchas horas atrás y espesamente, tal vez un caldo o una sopa con excesiva grasa” (37). The religious power exerted by the priest fails to discipline death through the sacrament of Extreme

Unction. The encounter between his stole and the bedpan highlights the priest’s body; this, together with the odd smell and excess oil, facilitates his connection to the dying man. The priest’s failure to reconcile himself with the abject represents the end-result of a system of blind religious power that, in my analysis, connects characters in “La frontera increíble,” “Dios en la

35 Critic Luis Arturo Ramos, when exploring the grotesque, including excrements, in other parts of Revueltas’ work, suggests that Revueltas ridicules sacred rituals and juxtaposes defecation and the divine to demonstrate that animalization is an integral part of bourgeois values, which the bourgeoisie would rather ignore (205).

51 tierra” and “¿Cuánta será la oscuridad?” These blind intellectual figures can be thought of as an assemblage that metaphorically criticizes the effects of the institutionalization of intellectuals in

Mexico; as such, they can also be read as a challenge to these same structures.

1.1.4 Family Structure: Institutionalizing Motherhood The Catholic Church’s religious power that connects characters in these stories strongly influences Mexican family structure, which is based on a patriarchal model. In this context, the male head of the household would work to protect the other family members. This structure, moreover, could only function so long as women accepted the maternal role and their subordinate position to men (Kaplan 262). In the 1940s, the Church, reluctant to acknowledge its loss of power and admit its subordination to the State, sought to establish itself as the guardian of the family’s moral qualities. At the same time, under Ávila Camacho, the president with a predilection for institutions, the family became a metaphor for the State and a State apparatus.

He and his government strived to reclaim the family, in particular, maternity, from conservative

Catholics, and embedded the family in their own power structure (Blum 141). Even before Ávila

Camacho had come to power, since the 1930s, the government had attempted to curb marriages of girls just entering puberty, and, through rural schools, would encourage the “campesina mother to learn more nutritious ways of feeding her family, adopt modern medicines and vaccines, and abjure curanderas, witchcraft, and useless herbs. She was to regularly bathe her children and wash their clothing” (Vaughan 43). In fact, according to historian Ann S. Blum, the administration of president Lázaro Cárdenas (1934-40), in power before Ávila Camacho, had

“articulated and promoted a secular version of motherhood linked to national development through ceremonies such as the Ministry of Labour’s 1936 Homage to the Proletarian Mother and Mother’s Day ceremonies coordinated by the SEP [Ministry of Education]” (141-2). Under

Ávila Camacho, these rituals, such as public Mothers’ Day ceremonies that distributed labour

52 saving appliances to working-class mothers, continued. Both Cárdenas and Avila Camacho’s administrations can be credited for creating “day-care centers and factory crèches, mothers’ clubs, and public cafeterias” in support of working mothers (Blum 142). Moreover, between

1946 and 1947, the first two years of Alemán’s presidential term, the Ministry of Public

Assistance made great efforts to regularize nebulous family structures. It registered 1600 births, legitimized 5000 children born out of wedlock and reviewed 1000 applications to adopt state wards, approving 155 (Blum 127).

The government attempted to claim the maternal role for its own purposes, yet Mexican culture and literature continued to link maternity to the Church. This religiously based veneration of motherhood is based on the Virgin Mary, even though the Virgin, as Julia Kristeva perceptively observes, represents an “ideal totality that no individual woman could possibly embody” (Tales of Love 246).36 The Virgin’s 16th century appearance to an indigenous man, Juan

Diego, the Virgin of Guadalupe, is a highly venerated figure in Mexico. Even though her legendary appearance is reminiscent of medieval and Early Modern Spanish Virgin apparition narratives, it is impossible to overstate her significance in contemporary Mexico.37 In fact, Silvia

Spitta argues that the Virgin of Guadalupe is key to understanding Mexican identity (9). A character in Revueltas’ “La frontera increíble,” only known as “the wife,” demonstrates this devotion. As her husband is dying, she repeats religious phrases, such as “Virgen mía, te pido que antes de que muera nos reconozca, nos diga una palabra, mire por última vez mi rostro” (39,

36 For a detailed analysis of the role of the Virgin in Western culture see the chapter “Stabat Mater,” in Kristeva’s Tales of Love or Marina Warner’s Alone of All Her Sex. 37 The Virgin of Guadalupe is the Patron Saint of the Americas including Greenland. Information about her history and contemporary significance can be found in Francisco de la Maza’s El guadalupanismo mexicano, John F. Moffit’s Our Lady of Guadalupe and Silvia Spitta’s Misplaced Objects.

53 emphasis mine). The Virgin is the ultimate mother and confidante, and a significant source of

Mexican culture’s emphasis on maternity.

This obsession with motherhood interpellates women as vessels for future children rather than as human beings in their own right. Kristeva maintains that in her context, 20th century

France, femininity continues to be absorbed entirely by motherhood (Tales of Love 234). In mid-

20th century Mexico, this tendency was also prevalent. Historian Ann S. Blum argues that women were primarily seen as bearers of future children, and in fact “needed children to participate in the national project” (128). She adds that “women claimed their adult status and gained access to participation in public arenas as mothers” (Blum 128, emphasis in text).

Maternal figures in Revueltas’ stories “El hijo tonto,” “La frontera increíble” and

“¿Cuánta será la oscuridad?” coincide with these theoretical and historical contributions. “El hijo tonto,” for instance, critiques its female protagonist, Mariana, who is dying of tuberculosis.

Unlike the perfect mother, Mary, the sick Mariana is, as her name implies, merely Mary-like.

Then, “La frontera increíble” highlights the devastating effects of Mexican culture’s emphasis on motherhood by animalizing the “imperfect,” grieving maternal figure. In this story, the mother’s body acts of its own accord. “Un sollozo se escapó del pecho de la madre,” “[s]e oyó en la habitación cómo caía la madre, de rodillas” and “[u]n grito de bestia sin fronteras salió de [sus] entrañas” (40-2). When she loses one of her children, the dying man’s unnamed mother is so devastated that her body acts independently of her mind. She then curses her son’s death, tying together maternity and religion: “–¡Ya te lo llevaste, Dios mío! […] – ¡Dios, Dios mío misericordioso!” (42). This awful situation is made worse in a context where religious power emphasized motherhood as the single source of female fulfillment.

In a similar vein, in “¿Cuánta será la oscuridad?” Genoveva loses her only child, and thus, in her context, her status. During the wake for her son Rito, the mob leader “tomó por los

54 pies al delicado, majestuoso cadáver de Rito, que era como una hermosa paloma fúnebre en el velorio, como una pequeña ave solemne llegada a la muerte” (169). The mob then holds

Genoveva down as it feeds Rito’s beautiful corpse to her pigs (169), which suggests that in the eyes of the mob, an unbaptized Protestant child’s dead body deserves to be destroyed in such a dramatic way. This sacrifice to pigs mocks Genoveva’s grief, and reminds us that in the Western

Christian tradition, the pig has been an object of fascination and fear, because it is almost human.

According to Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, this is because in Europe, pigs were traditionally kept in or near houses, and the pig’s skin-colour resembles European babies (50).

Vaughan adds that in rural Mexico, pigs had also traditionally been kept in family living quarters

(43). The episode thus gains cannibalistic overtones. The mob’s violent act also underscores the importance of the Virgin in Mexican Catholicism. Since Protestants do not revere the Virgin

Mary, they challenge Catholicism and a central tenet of Mexican identity. Robert Buffington’s analysis of Mexican masculinity and violence proves useful here. He suggests that psychic violence against men leads to physical violence against women (Buffington 188). For him, when women take advantage of work and leisure outside of traditional expectations of motherhood and chastity, which purportedly commits psychic violence against men, who then feel justified in their violent actions towards them. I expand Buffington’s argument to propose that when any dominated group deviates from traditional expectations, it is likely that they will face violent consequences by the dominant group. In other words, in this story, the predominantly male

Catholic mob felt as though these primarily female Protestants put social order in danger.

Coming from a position of fear and anger, these men could be read as psychically violated by the

Protestant group. The Protestants break with cultural expectations and violate the Catholicism central to Mexican culture, and are violently reprimanded for this break. “¿Cuánta será la oscuridad?” implicitly critiques Genoveva for her failure as a mother, which reminds us of the

55 portrayals of the female protagonist in “El hijo tonto” and the unnamed mother in “La frontera increíble.” When thought of together, these maternal figures become almost interchangeable. As such, they can be seen as an assemblage that acts as a metaphor for the effects of an oppressive vision of the family and maternity in Mexico and perhaps, a challenge to these same structures.

1.1.5 Myopic Medicine in “El hijo tonto”

The medical system, which we see particularly in “El hijo tonto,” also reflects conflict between the State and a traditional way of life, as the State sought to incorporate a discourse of science and health into its vision of a modern nation. In post-Revolutionary Mexico, science and medicine gained new power as scientists began to promote their solutions to longstanding social problems (Leys Stepan 94). 38 Vaughan adds that the school, which was to nationalize and modernize Mexican peasants, would “transform superstitious, locally oriented pariahs into patriotic, scientifically informed commercial producers” (4, emphasis mine). The fact that a school was designed to make its students into modern scientists illustrates the close relationship between the Ministries of Health and Education. In addition to influencing curriculum development, both Ministries worked together to confront what they considered to be the most pressing social problems, which included alcoholism and high-risk pregnancies. From the 1920s onward, the Ministry of Health created Divisions of Infant and Educational Hygiene, and these divisions worked in conjunction with the Ministry of Education’s Division of Psychopedagogy and Hygiene to develop public health initiatives that would promote hygiene and monitor mothers, particularly those with tuberculosis.

38 Science and positivism were also important forces behind Porfirio Díaz’s dictatorship at the turn of the 20th century.

This intense monitoring was meant to promote a stronger – if not cosmic – race and lead to a better, modern, Mexico. In this vein, a report from the First Conference about the Mexican

Child in 1921, by Esperanza Velázquez Bringas, affirms that “es necesario proteger al niño no solamente desde su primera infancia, sino desde su gestación. Hay que atender a la madre, para preparar su desarrollo mental y sus demás evoluciones psíquicas desde su vida intra-uterina”

(37). According to her report, monitoring pregnant women is important because it will allow

Mexico to obtain “una generación más fuerte físicamente y psicológicamente más normal y por lo tanto, preparada para su más alto desarrollo, tendríamos para el mañana, hombre más útiles a la Patria y la Humanidad” (40). This discourse was so pervasive in the 1920s, that when a

Ministry of Health official, Andrés [Contreras] wrote to the Director of the division on educational hygiene, Dr. Agustín Aguirre, he signed off, “[c]on niños sanos, se harán hombres sanos, y con hombres sanos se hará un México fuerte” (“Carta al director”). These goals and slogans did not remain solely in the realm of discourse: in 1943, shortly before Dios en la tierra was published, Ávila Camacho founded the Instituto Nacional de la Investigación Científica to promote scientific development (Gortari 400; Pérez Tamayo 222-3). This demonstrates how the

Mexican State absorbed medical and scientific discourse into its doctrine of progress, modernization and institutionalization; in this scheme, doctors stood to gain new power.

Revueltas’ stories challenge the emphasis, within medical and educational discourse, that an ideal body is key to a better Mexico. I argue that in “El hijo tonto,” non-ideal bodies, that is, characters with myopia, blindness and tuberculosis critique the medical system, and its ties to family structure, the State and urbanization. A myopic doctor in this story highlights the ways doctors colluded with the patriarchal family system to equate women with their bodies and to emasculate men. This story is set in an urban environment, unlike “Dios en la tierra” and

“¿Cuánta será la oscuridad,” set in a small town and the desert, respectively.

“El hijo tonto” reflects and critiques the government’s interest in monitoring pregnant women. In this story, a doctor pays a visit to the “imperfect” mother Mariana, who becomes a caricature of the feminine as her “misma dolorosa inmovilidad” and “abultado, monstruoso vientre” become a parody of pregnancy (97). By drawing on Foucault’s description of the medical gaze in The Birth of the Clinic, a gaze that examines a patient so that this patient will conform to an expected diagnosis (101), I suggest that the doctor in “El hijo tonto” scans

Mariana’s body in order to create a cluster of symptoms through which he can classify her.

Mariana notices that the doctor:

tenía una cara azul, de pómulos salientes, y encima de ellos bailaban unos espejuelos

brillantes, que no dejaban ver los ojos. A lo mejor no tenía ojos; era muy posible. No la

miró al rostro… Cuando aplicó el estetoscopio, los espejuelos aquéllos estaban clavados

en la pared, sin expresión. Sin embargo, a favor de un movimiento de la cabeza, Mariana

pudo ver, por fin, los ojos del médico. Los cristales eran muy gruesos y entonces los ojos

parecían enormemente grandes, como asombrados… Los ojos del doctor mostraban

asombro, pero al mismo tiempo crueldad. (99)

The doctor’s glasses are an instrument in an unequal power relationship, where Mariana, as a passive recipient of the purportedly civilizing or modernizing force of medicine, is made to feel out of place in her own home. As the glasses improve the doctor’s vision, they augment the distance between him and Mariana and emphasize the doctor’s inability to look at Mariana while he examines her. By concentrating on his eyes, moreover, “El hijo tonto” reminds us of the blind pastor, the dying teacher, the mob leader and the Cyclopean God in other stories in the same collection. The doctor’s glasses may supplement the pastor’s absent glasses, bring Mariana into focus as another of the pastor’s “manchas deshumanizantes,” or present the pastor’s followers as sick rather than as violated, frightened and immobile.

This medical system also emasculates men from lower social classes. The doctor tells

Jacinto that Mariana needs to convalesce in the countryside and Jacinto feels powerless since he cannot offer Mariana this opportunity (98). This suggests that as part of the urban working class, he has crossed the divide between village and city and cannot return. Jacinto compensates for this by imitating the doctor’s speech patterns. He talks to Mariana, repeating what the doctor had told him: “—… que necesitas sol, debes ir al campo…Aquí no te quedan tres meses de vida”

(100). In recognition of his loss of power,

Jacinto adoptó un continente estúpido. Sin necesidad de que dijera una sola palabra, ya se

adivinaba que escondía en su pecho algo fatal… el rostro se le alargaba en forma rara y la

voz, esa voz de por sí tan tímida, se quebraba en modulaciones ridículas. Lo más singular

de todo aquello era que Jacinto mudó inopinadamente de fisonomía. Sus facciones, en

estos momentos, eran demasiado semejantes a las de su propia mujer: la manera de plegar

los labios, como haciendo pucheros; los ojos, que se habían empequeñecido como si fuera

de miope. (99-100)

Jacinto appears stupid, changes his voice and tries to hide information from his wife as he gains her appearance. Through this involuntary instance of mimesis, he hides fatal information in his chest, and thus mimics the virus that was taking over Mariana’s lungs. Jacinto acquires feminine features and so he lowers himself in status. In this regard, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has observed that “femininity, in a person with a penis, can represent nothing but deficit and disorder” (22).

Indeed, in the context of the story, we could argue that Jacinto’s myopic eyes, like the pastor’s, weaken him, and so he reverses traditionally gendered behaviour. This forces his wife to adopt

“masculine” violence. Fulfilling this role, Mariana forces her son to pray with her,

“apoder[ándose] de un brazo de su hijo y oprimiéndole brutalmente la muñeca” (102). “Oprimía cada vez más fuerte. Los huesecitos del niño eran en sus garfios amarillos como un endeble tallo.

Mientras sentía esta carne débil entre sus manos, miraba aún la ventana” (102-3). She acquires a vengeful thirst for violence, and, like the Cyclopean God “le cegaba la razón en absoluto,” and like the teacher, she loses her eyes in space (102). Her blind violence affects her son, and he falls on the wet floor with his “piernas temblequeantes y sus ojos cegatones” (103). And so, in a social system where effeminacy undermines authority, the doctor imposes his power on Jacinto,

Jacinto adopts Mariana’s physical features, she acts with violence towards Jaimito and their son’s eyes become blinded. The power exerted by the doctor in order to “heal” Mariana evokes the discourse of medicine, science and progress in the story’s historical context, and in the text, unleashes psychic and physical violence that blinds her entire family.

1.2 Connected Bodies as a Mode of Corporeal Resistance in Dios en la tierra and Dormir en tierra

Revueltas’ short stories thus demonstrate how the State, the Church, family structure and the medical system interpellate characters as blind and powerless leaders, inadequate priests, injuries, mobs, monstrous pregnancy, grieving mothers and effeminate men. Indeed, it is widely recognized that Revueltas’ work reflects a pessimistic point of view.39 On the other hand, some critics, such as Javier Durán, have argued that “se va formando una reconfiguración de la modalidad grotesca en su obra [de Revueltas] que conlleva una función desmitificadora, disidente y problematizadora de las condiciones materiales de existencia del ser humano” (90).

Through grotesque imagery, the characters challenge the material conditions of being. I build on

Durán’s contributions and propose that when characters in Dios en la tierra and Dormir en tierra become unrecognizable as human referents and thus have no “interiority” or “psychology,” they

39 Revueltas’ work has been identified as existentialist, difficult to analyze and producing aesthetics of chaos. See for example the first chapter of Frank Loveland Smith’s Visibilidad y discurso pp. 7-50.

60 challenge their situation. I would argue that as these characters in different stories are reduced to bare life, become dusty mobs or similarly experience blindness, we can imagine the characters’ bodies joining together. In addition to illustrating a historical situation of repression, they might also be seen to challenge their situations and point towards an alternate future.

To better understand the convergence of past, present and future in Revueltas’ stories from the 1940s, I return to Bosteels, in this case, to his analyses of Revueltas’ essays written after the 1968 Tlatelolco massacre, subsequently collected in México 68: juventud y revolución.

Bosteels argues that in these essays we see the desire that “what did not happen, be made to happen” (95, emphasis in text). In other words, according to Bosteels, Revueltas’ political writing incorporates events, such as the 1958-1959 railway strike and the 1968 student protests and Tlatelolco massacre, into an imagined or alternative historical trajectory, which would normally remain in the realm of fictional writing. Bosteels maintains that for Revueltas, disappointments with the lack of long-term change can have a positive effect if they are theorized correctly (95-6). Bringing this observation to bear on my analysis Revueltas’ stories, we see that by reflecting their past, such as the Cristero War, these stories comment on their present, the beginning of the “Mexican Miracle,” and might signal a positive change in the future. By tracing the intertextual connections between characters in different stories, then, I posit that these characters could become a collective that would challenge existing powers.

Revueltas’ stories reflect an absence of individual autonomy by reducing characters to mass bodies, presenting similar experiences of blindness and representing shared wounds. State structures reduce soldiers to the same appearance, and figures such as the teacher, the pastor and the mob leader exhibit blindness or loss of eyesight analogous to Revueltas’ critique of intellectual structures in Mexico. Elsewhere, these stories emphasize the end result of a religious system that worships a Cyclopean God. That is, we see how Catholic characters act on the

Church’s power as a mob in “¿Cuánta será la oscuridad?” and the priest whose stole leaks into a bedpan as he tries to perform the sacrament of Extreme Unction in “La frontera increíble” is forced to face the abject. Mothers, such as Mariana in “El hijo tonto,” Genoveva in “¿Cuánta será la oscuridad?” and the unnamed mother in “La frontera increíble” are similarly chastised in these stories. A doctor in “El hijo tonto,” who exerts power related to the medical system, appears weak and blind and subjugates Mariana to her body and feminizes Jacinto.

These stories present characters with blindness and suffering bodies so repeatedly that I read connections between them. As a result, I would argue that these characters function as a single collective entity. Although this collective relates to the abject, characters do not become individual subjects by reconciling themselves with it. Hence, they act differently from Kristeva’s psychoanalytically based analysis, which maintains that the abject interrupts individual subjectivity (Powers of Horror 3). Nor does this collective serve a specific narrative purpose, or a kind of communicative shorthand, that would conform to Mitchell and Snyder’s understanding of the function of deformed bodies in literature, which “destabilize the borders of the subject”

(58). Moreover, characters in Revueltas’ stories surpass Gail Weiss’ notion of intercorporeality, a type of individual subjectivity that she defines as being built through an unspecified type of relationship with other bodies and body images (33). We can envision this collective of characters through Puar’s understanding of the assemblage. Puar’s reading proposes that the assemblage is a dynamic entity composed of parts that self-annihilate in order to transform their situations. 40 In the literary text, Revueltas’ characters, similar to Puar’s notion of deconstructing or annihilating a theoretical concept in order to make way for a newer model, cry, writhe, and kill in order to destruct and annihilate themselves, and confront the powers that oppress them.

40 Puar’s contribution arises from her concept of debility, a term that she employs in order to deconstruct notions of debilitation, disability and capacity (“Prognosis Time” 166).

Revueltas’ short stories relate to his political writing, and, like it, advance a collective corporeal response to structures of power. In my reading, this corporeal response takes the form of an assemblage, which suggests a dynamic entity that undergoes annihilation in order to move towards change. Indeed, as Bosteels has argued, for Revueltas, power must inscribe itself on the body for there to be any kind of resistance (60). In Revueltas’ stories, representatives of the

Church and the government inscribe themselves on characters bodies, creating the instances of blindness, feminization of masculine characters, and feeding corpses to pigs, which we have seen in this chapter. I read these stories in the same way as Bosteels reads Revueltas’ essays to suggest that this inscription of power on the characters’ bodies is what allows the characters to move towards resistance. In other words, as these characters become fused entities such as mobs, or through textual similarities, intellectual, medical, religious or patriarchal power inscribes itself on their bodies and becomes the precondition for potential resistance.

Revueltas’ political writing, moreover, vindicates the body. In the epigraph to México 68, he emphasizes that the students, “quienes representaban a esta corriente proletaria,” were a significant part of the historical process in Mexico (28). This epigraph highlights the protesters’ social class and their participation in a collective working towards change. Revueltas’ experience in Lecumberri similarly connects collective action and transformation, although his writing highlights his individual role. In June 1969, for instance, he declared a hunger strike. He told the director of the prison that he could no longer stand the vigilance and mistreatment of prisoners, who were deprived of visits and “golpea[dos] a puntapiés y puñetazos” (México 68 211-2). Until he was moved to another area of the prison with a fellow political prisoner, he maintained that he would not eat or leave his cell (México 68 212-3). Although he did not go on strike at that point, because he was moved to be closer to his friend, several months later, Revueltas’ declaration led to a hunger strike involving 127 other political prisoners in Lecumberri, six in the women’s

63 prison, and in other prisons throughout Mexico (México 68 222; 341). The widespread hunger strike demonstrates that committed people were willing to modify their bodies by undergoing self-deprivation for the benefit of others and in service of a larger political goal.

Revueltas’ stories also advance a collective response to these powers. Their characters imitate one another’s bodies to vindicate emasculation, religious oppression, urban uncertainty and patriarchal family structure. I propose that the characters in “El hijo tonto” and “Dios en la tierra,” dehumanized by representatives of the Church, the State, intellectuals, patriarchal structures and the medical system, develop alternative religious practices based on their bodies and life-giving water.

In “El hijo tonto,” we saw how Jacinto adopted Mariana’s features, proving the power of the medical system over their family. Jaimito, their son, then adopts the “missing” father’s characteristics:

[Jaimito] había heredado de él [Jacinto] las costumbres raras, como, por ejemplo, la de

estar inmóvil, pensando, con la mirada perdida en el espacio. En los momentos de aguda

emoción también le temblaba en forma incontenible la punta de la barba. (100)

Jaimito’s body becomes distorted in relation to Jacinto’s response to Mariana’s decreasing abilities. Mariana “sabía que su presencia [de Jaimito] en el cuarto significaba muchas cosas”

(100). I am inclined to agree. Jaimito’s shifting body is important because in literature, unusual bodies tend to serve as proof of abstract ideas. In Ato Quayson’s taxonomy of disability representation, we see that disabled figures in literature become containers of meaning (45).

Perhaps this means that after Mariana dies, Jaimito will take on his father’s role in their new familial configuration.

Then, Jaimito’s body transforms again, and reminds us of the character Néstora in

“¿Cuánta será la oscuridad?” The story tells us that Mariana “lo sintió de pronto como a un

64 anciano, en realidad. Olvidó por completo el rostro de su hijo” (101). She begins to question this new being: “¿[q]ué extraño cuerpo se recostaba sobre la almohada y gemía de aquella manera?”

(101). He cries as well, but Mariana is unable to believe that his cry comes from a child,

sino de una persona adulta. Y ni siquiera de una simple persona adulta. Una persona con

calidad extraña, sobrenatural, como si a través del niño gimiese mucha gente más, como

si por el niño se dejasen sentir la noche y la muerte. (101)

His crying, writhing body creates a moment of certainty for his family’s uncertain situation within a rapidly modernizing Mexico. Moreover, Jaimito’s physical response opens his experience to others, including Néstora’s superhuman cry. In “¿Cuánta será la oscuridad?”

Néstora cries with a “llanto adulto y envejecido…un llanto más allá de la edad” (166). Néstora’s cry, which confronts religious suffering, becomes the human cry of pain and incomprehension, which, the story tells us, continues through all other people whose bodies are forced to experience “el dolor entero del mundo” (167). In the story, Néstora’s cry establishes a bond with her fellow characters as they physically surround her. The textual link between Néstora, whose cry responds to religious persecution, and Jaimito, a character whose unusual body and poverty illustrate the negative effects of urbanization, suggests that Néstora’s cry also responds to the conditions that created urbanization.

Néstora’s cry also leads to her mother’s confrontation with the pastor, extending the stories’ challenge to urbanization and Catholic persecution to include a direct confrontation with religious and intellectual structures. Néstora’s mother Rosenda embodies a more devoted motherhood than Mariana and so she approaches the pastor and asks him to calm her daughter.

The pastor ignores Rosenda even though the story claims that he would have liked to kiss her forehead and thank her for her faith (166). Rosenda tries to speak to him again but the pastor barely acknowledges her, telling her that only she can calm her daughter (166). Rosenda’s

65 insistence that the pastor do something, “[s]ólo usted puede calmarla,” and the story's description of the pastor’s response “[n]o quiso replicar una palabra” (166), illustrates a way female characters use their maternity to attempt to confront unresponsive intellectual and religious leaders. It could also suggest that women use the State and Church-supported maternal role should they seek to challenge representatives of these same structures.

Water and tears are another important source of resistance and challenge in these stories.

“El hijo tonto,” for instance, uses mythical tears to point to hope. According to the story, on a long dark night, people everywhere began to cry tears “que nunca se habían derramado sobre el mundo y hoy limpian los cuerpos” (96). Their tears became rain, and then a flood of biblical proportions and miraculous abilities. After all, these tears “[l]avan y purifican todo lo que tocan”

(95). “[S]e alzan sobre la tierra como la esperanza misma, plena de luz y de radiante eternidad”

(96). These tears reframe the typically feminine arenas of emotions and doubt as powerful and healing. Since they remind us of Weiss’ assertion that intercorporeal bodies are fluid and expansive (53), perhaps these tears could be read as facilitating textual connections between

Jaimito, Jacinto and Mariana and characters in other stories.

In keeping with this idea, thirsty soldiers and rural townspeople in “Dios en la tierra” want this water more than anything. Water serves as the basis for the townspeople’s alternative religious beliefs that confront the government’s secularism and Catholic religious power. The town in fact exerts a mysterious power over the soldiers and they arrive in the town “como si se hubieran echado encima todos los caminos y los trajeron ahí” (12). Part of this supernatural attraction is a thirst God, who is everywhere, and who forces the soldiers to deny their bodily needs to further their goals (14). In this self-denial, they almost acquire the townspeople’s God.

Their thirst, a desire the story likens to sex, encourages the town’s men to protect their well. Its water, “tierna y llena de gracia” (13), reminds us of the Hail Mary, which states, “Dios te salve,

María, llena eres de gracia.” The story infuses this Christian imagery with indigenous mythology and turns the re-imagined Hail Mary into an elegy for ancient forces. Hence, we learn that “[e]l agua es joven y antigua. Parece una mujer lejana y primera, eternamente leal. El mundo se hizo de agua y de tierra y ambas están unidas, como si dos cielos opuestos hubiesen realizado nupcias imponderables” (13). “Dios en la tierra” departs from the Genesis account to create an alternative religious narrative. It may refer to the Popol Vuh, a 16th century document that collected the indigenous Maya-Quiché traditions, legends and beliefs. This collection tells a creation story in which the gods, after several unsuccessful attempts, create people from corn and water (78-83).

Critic Francisco Ramírez Santacruz supports this argument. In his analysis of one of Revueltas’ novels, El luto humano, Ramírez Santacruz notes that “[p]ara el indígena, la relación entre Dios y el mundo sólo es posible a partir de llantos y lágrimas, pues en éstos, Dios lo sabe escuchar”

(39). Although the critic sustains that Revueltas saw this aspect of religion as negative (Ramírez

Santacruz 39), I would argue that in “Dios en la tierra,” water and tears are the basis for a life- giving alternative religious practice. Thus, the soldiers’ thirst unites them, sets up their confrontation with the townspeople and alludes to either an alternative religious practice, or highlights the positive aspects of a Catholicism rooted in cries and tears.

The townspeople’s collective body also acts in accordance with its reduction to an eyeless, rock-like mob that protects itself against the soldiers’ thirst and the government’s incursion on their way of life. When the soldiers first arrive in the town, the townspeople cry

“¡Los federales! ¡Los federales!” and “¡Viva Cristo Rey!” (13). Towards the end of the story, when the townspeople are about to torture the teacher, a subgroup of men on the periphery speaks of its own accord. This group explicitly links the teacher to the government and the soldiers, cursing him because “¡Les dio agua a los federales, el desgraciado…!” (16). The townspeople’s collective body then absorbs this government representative. They ensure that as a

67 traitorous Judas, the teacher would become the son of their Cyclopean God. They rape and penetrate the teacher with a stick (16). Before the townspeople had attacked the teacher, the soldiers called him “profesor,” which means a high school teacher or professor. As the townspeople attack him, the teacher becomes a “maestro,” or primary schoolteacher. This downgrades the teacher’s prestige and shows that the townspeople could not follow the intellectual leader who evokes literary, artistic and religious history to become a Christ-like figure. The townspeople avenge this resemblance through their own alternative cosmology. They make their teacher like them so that “[d]e lejos el maestro parecía un espantapájaros sobre su estaca, agitándose como si lo moviera el viento, el viento que ya corría, llevando la voz profunda, ciclópea, de Dios, que había pasado por la tierra” (16). Thus, the teacher’s deformed body joins the townspeople’s reactionary cosmology, becoming the blind son of its one-eyed

God. In his failure to uphold his point of view, the teacher joins the townspeople’s collective response to the government. Somehow, the desolate territory and awful situation was also like the resurrection reflected in “¿Cuánta será la oscuridad?” “porque el cielo, entre las agaves, las volvía, de tan radiante, flores, flores verdes, coronas, laurel espantoso y puro” (167-8).

Revueltas’ stories critique governmental, intellectual, religious, familial and medical structures of power. Some characters, such as the teacher and the group of soldiers in “Dios en la tierra,” illustrate how the Mexican government propagated change through education and military might. Figures such as the Protestant pastor and the mob leader in “¿Cuánta será la oscuridad?” and the teacher in “Dios en la tierra” allude to intellectuals that critiqued some discourses of progress and power while embracing others. The priest in “El hijo tonto” demonstrates that the Catholic Church subjected those involved in its hierarchy, and the townspeople in “Dios en la tierra” and the mob in “¿Cuánta será la oscuridad?” demonstrate the

Church’s effects on other Catholics. Maternal figures, in “El hijo tonto,” “La frontera increíble” and “¿Cuánta será la oscuridad?” demonstrate the negative effects of a system that equates femininity with maternity. “El hijo tonto,” present doctors that scan, classify and diagnose their patients under a medical gaze. Each of these stories negates its characters’ individuality and in my reading, the characters’ bodies evoke one another as they attempt to change their situation.

Townspeople in “Dios en la tierra” crucify the teacher, persecuted Protestants band together and try and make their leader help them in “¿Cuánta será la oscuridad?” and Jaimito becomes an old man in “El hijo tonto” whose cry evokes the screaming Néstora in “¿Cuánta será la oscuridad?”

Images of sight and blindness across these stories suggest that the teacher, the Catholic mob, the mass of townspeople and the doctor are subject to the Government, the Church and the medical system, and they act on this power to subject others. For instance, the teacher in “Dios en la tierra” is killed by a faceless mob of rural townspeople, who are associated with a Cyclopean

God, and these townspeople in turn act in response to a government 's blind incursions on their way of life. The pastor and his Protestant followers in “¿Cuánta será la oscuridad?” challenged the Catholic religious monopoly and provoked Catholic rage in the form of a mob led by man whose eyes were white. As a result of this violence, the Protestants flee to the desert and are subjected to the unresponsive pastor who prefers to keep his eyes closed. This blindness also relates to the way I consider resistance in Revueltas’ stories. By coming together to change their situations, characters in these stories evoke Revueltas’ political beliefs even though they do not align perfectly with his political commentary. I read intertextual connections between these characters and posit that the characters form something like an assemblage. In this way, they remind us of Puar’s assertion that self-annihilating a set of beliefs or terms can transform a tragic situation. As assemblages, the characters’ tears, for instance, in “Dios en la tierra” and “El hijo tonto,” form part of separate alternative religious visions based on water. In the next chapter, we

69 turn to a series of Juan Rulfo’s stories, which adopt a distinct critical position towards political, economic and social realities of the same time period, by focussing on relationships between the

Church, the government and the family.

2 Motherhood, Pilgrimage and Collective Bodies in El llano en llamas

Juan Rulfo’s stories and photographs examine the Mexican countryside: its landscape, its people and their beliefs. This chapter explores Rulfo’s short stories “Nos han dado la tierra,”

“Talpa,” “Macario” and “Luvina,” from his 1953 collection El llano en llamas and complementary photographs from this same time period.41 These short stories represent the

Church, family structure, the government and landholding patterns, which confront the land’s natural power. Narrative strategies in these stories, especially their first-person singular and first- person plural narrative voices, are similarly powerful; they relate to aesthetic innovation encouraged by the Mexican government, and may signal additional governmental power. In the stories, I propose that these narrative strategies and representatives of powerful entities remove the characters’ individuality, feminize masculine characters and facilitate symbolic connections between characters. I posit that these characters’ individual and collective bodies illustrate oppression and the need for resistance.

This chapter builds on my analysis of José Revueltas’ short stories, in which I argued that mobs, injured bodies, tears and alternative religious beliefs pointed to oppression and resistance in their context. This is not surprising, since critics have noted similarities between the two writers’ works (Veas Mercado Los modos 23; Ortega Galindo 101). In my view, in both Rulfo and Revueltas’ stories, representations of the Church, the government and the family facilitate symbolic connections between characters. Similarly, both sets of stories present monstrous bodies, like the white mass that killed the teacher in “Dios en la tierra” and the mass of pilgrims

41 “Nos han dado la tierra” and “Macario” were first published in Pan in 1945 (Leal 26), and “Talpa” appeared in América in 1950 (Gutiérrez Marrone 5). “Luvina” appeared for the first time in El llano en llamas in 1953.

71 in Rulfo’s “Talpa.” I associated these collective bodies to Revueltas’ political proposals, as

Revueltas’ life and work reflected a clear political agenda, while Rulfo’s does not. In Rulfo’s stories, the characters’ fused bodies join the stories together, creating a sense of a collective body, which I propose is a metaphor that highlights the need for resistance.

Rulfo’s work, like Revueltas’, was produced during the “Mexican Miracle,” a time period in which the Mexican state was invested in narratives of modernization, progress and internationalization. To this end, it attempted to modify landholding patterns through agrarian reform and created intellectual structures that supported its goals; meanwhile, the Church and family structure reacted against the Mexican government’s plans. This chapter argues that in

Rulfo’s stories, as characters that represent the government and intellectual structures confront characters that represent the Church and family structure, as well as natural forces of wind, drought and heat, they oppress less powerful characters such that this latter group loses its individual features. At the same time, the loss of individual features, and the accompanying presence of collective bodies and the development of similar features in characters in different stories leads me to propose that they become a collective embodied subject. This subject, or metaphorical assemblage, may point towards resisting these same oppressive entities. In Rulfo’s stories, collective subjects exist alongside hopeful symbols of water and corn, and gesture towards resistance by challenging limiting narratives for women and facilitating the formation of alternative family structure.

In this chapter, I categorize powerful entities through the terms “progressive” and

“reactionary.” Representatives of the government, such as land reform officials and teachers, exert a “progressive” power in Rulfo’s work, because in the 1940s and 1950s, the time these stories were written, the Mexican government was interested in progress, modernization and

72 development. The stories’ narrative techniques, which remind us of the Mexican government’s interest in internationalization, similarly point to ongoing government influence among Mexican intellectuals. At the same time, the Church and family structure reacted against the government’s plans, and, as such, their representatives are considered in this chapter to exert a “reactionary” power. Although the land is outside of anyone’s control, it most often works in concert with this second group of powers.

In Rulfo’s stories, representatives of these reactionary and progressive powers reduce less powerful characters’ humanity by likening them to animals, metonymically reducing them to a single body part, feminizing masculine characters or removing their ability to speak. Indeed, according to critic Juan Martínez Millán, Rulfian literary criticism has tended to focus on this loss of agency and has argued that the llano is hopeless and annuls all possibilities for change

(55). In accordance with this tendency, Michael S. Jordan posits that the universe Rulfo depicts is a “failed communicative situation…a world in which the message cannot get through, and individuals chatter noisily away in communicative isolation from one another” (127-8).42 This chapter builds on this critical tradition to explore how powerful characters, such as priests, representatives of the Church, and mothers, who uphold traditional family structure, as well as narrative voices, deform less powerful characters’ bodies and reduce them to what Agamben calls bare life. “Nos han dado la tierra” describes the experience of four campesino men as they walk across the dry land they have been given through land reform and their interactions with land reform officials. Its narrator-protagonist removes his companions’ ability to speak. As one of these companions, Melitón, appears to give birth to a chicken, he creates a sharp aesthetic

42 This idea of oppression is common to many analyses of Rulfo’s work. See for example Donald K. Gordon’s chapter “El arte narrativo en tres cuentos de Rulfo,” which states that Rulfo’s stories demonstrate Rulfo’s preoccupation for his “prójimos desdichados” (360).

73 contrast to the dry land and the narrator-protagonist’s speech. Then, in “Macario,” the child-like narrator-protagonist, Macario, tells us about his dehumanizing experiences at Church, in his godmother’s home, where he lives, and the connection he forms with his godmother’s servant,

Felipa, as she breastfeeds him. In this story, the church building, the ritual of mass and the narrator-protagonist’s unnamed godmother feminize Macario. In so doing, “Macario” suggests that women are closer to their bodies and that men, whose mental abilities are typically celebrated, are somehow closer to ideal humanity than women. At the same time, we see the formation of a collective subject in Rulfo’s stories. When stories in El llano en llamas portray characters whose bodies exhibit wounds, display unusual behavior or deviate from gendered expectations, they, in accordance with David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder’s understanding of deviant bodies in literature, would disrupt the characters’ potential for individual subjectivity

(58). “Talpa,” for instance, describes how the narrator-protagonist, his sister-in-law and his brother, Tanilo, make a pilgrimage to the Virgin of Talpa to cure Tanilo. The story portrays

Tanilo through his oozing open sores. This portrayal, and the fact that Tanilo’s wife and brother must care for him, removes Tanilo’s individual agency. The narrator-protagonist’s affair with his sister-in-law further complicates the situation. In “Luvina,” the narrator-protagonist, a teacher, describes his family’s experience of moving to rural Mexico to “civilize” campesinos, to an unnamed and possibly non-existent audience. His memories reduce the campesinos to a collective, uneducated mass.

I maintain that in this potentially hopeless llano, the Church, family structure, representatives of the government and the land facilitate the formation of a collective. Characters in each of Rulfo’s stories evoke one another: Tanilo’s open, oozing sores in “Talpa,” for instance, spill out of his body in a way similar to breast milk, and thus remind us of the way a character in “Macario,” Felipa, breastfeeds Macario, an older child. In my reading, Tanilo’s sores

74 in “Talpa,” and the fact that he is not healed after undergoing a religious pilgrimage, might draw on the images of Felipa breastfeeding Macario to challenge the Church. At the same time,

Felipa’s lack of agency in her experience of breastfeeding Macario can be read alongside

Tanilo’s pilgrimage to challenge family structure that privileges women as mothers above other roles they seek to occupy. To explore these intertextual connections, and propose that they point towards change in their context, I draw on Weiss’ vocabulary of “intercorporeality,” and Puar’s theoretical contributions regarding the potential within self-annihilating groups. I propose that intertextual connections between characters in Rulfo’s stories create a collective or

“intercorporeal” body that incorporates the individual characters. Puar’s reading of the assemblage offers a helpful description of this collective body: for her, this group only has the potential for transformation if it self-annihilates (“Prognosis Time” 169). Thus, the mass of dusty pilgrims that bathes as if it were one body in “Talpa,” becomes a collective or intercorporeal entity, that has the potential to transform the religious framework within the text only by annihilating the individual pilgrims. Moreover, as this mass body reminds us of the campesinos in “Nos han dado la tierra,” I also interpret it as a critique of the government’s land-redistribution program. These desolate and desperate collectives annihilate the possibility of an embodied subjectivity that would encompass mind and body. Yet, because of the way Rulfo’s stories highlight their characters’ embodiment, characters evoke one another to form collectives that I view as a critique of their context. Thus, these collective images create avenues for reflecting on the potential for change within the loss of individual subjectivity.

2.1 Overpowering Rulfo’s Historical Context

In “Nos han dado la tierra,” “Talpa,” “Macario” and “Luvina,” representatives and representations of the Church, the State, family structure and intellectuals compete with one

75 another to repress individual characters. Heat, drought and thirst dominate the characters and point to the land’s natural power. In Rulfo’s work, allusions to the Church and family structure, such as pilgrimages, church buildings and homes, ally with the land’s “natural” features to confront representations of the government, such as teachers and land reform officials, and the narrative structures that coincide with the government’s emphasis on internationalization.

A masculine-feminine binary allows us to conceive of the struggle between these so- called progressive and reactionary powers. In this way, my reading draws on feminist theory to provide a new lens through which to re-examine Rulfo’s work.43 I have chosen to equate the government with masculinity, and the Church, the land and family structure with femininity because at the time these stories were written, the Mexican government was heavily invested in a particular image of masculinity.44 Then-president Adolfo Ruiz Cortines (1952-1958) used the words “virile,” “honour” and “patriotic” to lend legitimacy to his regime. This also distanced

Ruiz Cortines’ regime from the previous president, Miguel Alemán (1946-1952), and Alemán’s associations with the high life of drinking and carousing (Luna Elizarrarás 69, 86-90).45 Ruiz

Cortines’ rhetoric not only dissociated two presidents from the same political party, it also pushed the image of a hungry and savage Revolutionary male to the sidelines (Sánchez Prado

Naciones intelectuales 37). This hyper-virility also challenged women’s increasing ventures

43 As far as I am aware, none of these stories have been analyzed in this way. Debra Castillo’s Easy Women does, however, analyze a previously unpublished fragment of Rulfo’s work as part of her feminist approach to Modern Mexican fiction. 44 This categorization also follows, in part, a tendency to associate women to land. For details of the historical roots of this relationship see Susan Griffin’s Woman and Land: The Roaring Inside Her. A later critique of ecofeminism can be found in Janet Biehl’s Rethinking Ecofeminist Politics. 45 Using such gendered imagery reminds us of the “Pleito de 1925” in which Mexican intellectuals attempted to define the role of the intellectual post-Revolutionary Mexico. Some characterized themselves as “virile” and decried their opponents as feminine or homosexual. For more information see Sánchez Prado’s Naciones intelectuales 33- 42.

76 outside of the domestic sphere because it emphasized the necessity of a specific feminine partner whose moral superiority would work towards the benefit of those around her (Luna Elizarrarás

152). Rulfo’s stories further the sense of an ongoing hierarchical relationship between men and women as the masculine or progressive powers seek to dominate feminine powers, and reduce their adherents to their embodied realities.

This imagery illuminates the government’s struggle to convince other powers, such as the family matriarch, the mother, the church matriarch, the Virgin, and the idea of motherland, or the land’s natural power, to fall in line with its system for administering religion, family relationships and land reform. The masculine-feminine binary is not always exact, reminds us of

Jean Franco’s observation that the madre patria, the mother-fatherland, is effectively a lexical hermaphrodite (79). Like Franco’s observations about the relationship between land and nation, this binary parallels unclear demarcations between these powerful entities in Rulfo’s stories: for instance, whether the Church or the land exerts greater influence over religious pilgrims that walk through the desert in “Talpa.” The chapter’s subsequent sections use this gendered language to demonstrate that both groups of powers were dehumanizing.

2.1.1 The Government Adopts a Cosmopolitan Vision

Under both president Alemán and president Ruiz Cortines, the Mexican government used the institutions it had created to dominate Mexican people. For instance, it encouraged intellectuals to move in specific directions by funding various prizes and scholarships and manipulated workers and campesinos through its network of affiliated organizations, land reform programs and the public education system. Rulfo’s career as a civil servant, his prominence in the intellectual realm and innovative narrative strategies in his stories demonstrate the government’s influence over the intellectual sphere.

In the 1950s, the government held sway over this sphere through the cultural institutions it managed and the prizes and scholarships it distributed to artists and writers. The government also encouraged innovative narrative form in order to allow Mexican literature to speak to similar literary trends taking place in other countries.46 As a result, intellectuals working at places like the government-controlled television channel Televisa and publishing houses such as

Editorial Diana, and the government’s press, the Fondo de Cultura Económica (FCE) adopted the government’s international vision (Agustín Tragicomedia mexicana 1 90).47

Juan Rulfo’s life reflects the government’s interest in internationalization and the intellectual sphere. Rulfo’s participation in the government project as a bureaucrat, his prominence in the intellectual domain and the aesthetic innovation in his stories suggest a connection between the government and the intellectual sphere. Indeed, as a civil servant and writer, Rulfo formed part of a tradition in post-Revolutionary Mexico that had begun as early as the estridentista congressman Manuel Maples Arce and the diplomat Alfonso Reyes (Sánchez

Prado Naciones intelectuales 145). Rulfo began his career in 1935, but according to Antonio

Alatorre, this job “no era agobiante,” in other words, he did not take it seriously, and so Rulfo was fired (Part 2, 13-15). After this job ended, Rulfo moved to Guadalajara and worked throughout the 1950s at Televicentro, a state-sponsored TV channel. In 1962, he began working for another government institution, the Instituto Nacional Indigenista (INI), where he remained until his death. He received government approval for his writing through a scholarship at the

46 As discussed in the first chapter, the Mexican government began to enter the international realm by participating in the Second World War; this international focus continued as subsequent governments participate in international institutions (Brushwood Narrative Innovation 37-42). 47 The government also influenced writers by supporting newspapers like Novedades, El Heraldo de México, Avance, distributing scholarships to the Centro Mexicano de Escritores (CME), through its official press, the Fondo de Cultura Económica (FCE) and awarding prizes, such as the Premio Nacional de Letras, to those that fell in line with its interests (Cohn 165).

Centro Mexicano de Escritores (CME) from 1953 to 1954, and employment as a teacher there from 1967 to 1983. The FCE published his short story collection El llano en llamas and novel

Pedro Páramo and he won the Premio Nacional de Letras in 1970 (Cohn 165; Leal 10-11).

Although the government’s direct influence over artistic creation is impossible to prove, Rulfo’s mark on the Mexican intellectual sphere is not. According to Carlos Monsiváis,

[e]n nuestra cultura nacional, Juan Rulfo ha sido un intérprete absolutamente confiable

(por lo mismo que no pretende erigirse en sistema) de la lógica íntima, los modos de ser,

el sentido idiomático, la poesía secreta y pública de los pueblos y las comunidades

campesinos. (“Sí, tampoco los muertos” 31)

Thanks to the government’s support, Rulfo became so influential that he was credited with being the interpreter of national culture.

In a further gesture towards the relationship between the government and intellectuals,

Rulfo’s stories exhibit what I have described as internationalist aesthetics or narrative strategies.

These include multiple perspectives, stream-of-consciousness narration and the conflation of the speaker and his audience.48 Although these narrative techniques remind us of the celebrated

Mexican author Agustín Yáñez’s 1947 novel, Al filo del agua, I label these techniques

“internationalist” because they are strongly influenced by earlier literary works from other countries, such as James Joyce’s coming of age novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

(1916), set in turn of the century Dublin, which uses stream-of-consciousness narration in the

48 Pericles Lewis’ 2000 study Modernism, Nationalism and the Novel examines the relationship between form and historical context in the novels of Joyce, Conrad, Proust and d’Annuzio. He “addresses the role of the modernists’ experiments with the form of the novel in their attempts to rethink the values and institutions associated with the sovereign nation-state” (3). Lewis’ study of novels in English and French thus provides a precedent for my argument.

79 third person, and the American author William Faulkner. Faulkner’s short story, “A Rose for

Emily,” for instance, uses unusual narrative voices to convey a rapidly modernizing American

South (1930).49 “Macario” reminds us of Joyce by employing stream-of-consciousness narration and by being preoccupied with sin and sexuality. The first-person plural narrator in “Nos han dado la tierra,” who describes a group of four rural men and their experiences with agrarian reform, confuses the speaker and his companions, and reminds us of narrators in Faulkner’s stories.

Movement back and forth in time in other stories in El llano en llamas mimics cinematic flashback and flash-forward, a further illustration of cosmopolitan or international literary techniques. In “Talpa,” for instance, a narrative voice creates a circular time by continually juxtaposing sentences that begin “before,” “during” or “after” its moment of enunciation. The story opens as the narrator and his sister-in-law, Natalia, return home from their pilgrimage to the Virgin of Talpa. After two sentences that describe Natalia, crying, the story moves into the past to describe their pilgrimage. The second paragraph then begins “[s]in embargo, antes, entre los trabajos de tantos días difíciles,” which contrasts with the beginning of the third paragraph,

“[n]i después, al regreso, cuando nos vinimos caminando de noche sin conocer el sosiego” (55, emphasis mine). The story continues to confuse one time frame with another in two later paragraphs. One begins, “[y]o ya sabía desde antes lo que había dentro de Natalia,” and then the next paragraph opens with, “[y]o sé ahora que Natalia está arrepentida de lo que pasó” (57).

49 For more information about aesthetic influences associated with literary modernism see Paulo da Luz Moreira’s dissertation “Regionalism and Modernism in the Short Stories of William Faulkner, João Guimarães Rosa, and Juan Rulfo”, particularly pp. 182-91. Carlos Blanco Aguinaga’s chapter, “Realidad y estilo en Juan Rulfo,” also highlights external influences on Rulfo’s work.

“Talpa” thus describes past and present in similar ways, which makes it difficult to distinguish between these temporal references.

The Mexican government’s influence over the intellectual sphere coupled with Rulfo’s prominence in intellectual circles in Mexico and longstanding employment in the civil service confirms a connection between Rulfo and the government. The aesthetic innovation in his stories, which points outwards, relates to a growing interest in internationalization by the

Mexican government in the 1950s. The relationship between Rulfo and the government and the fact that Rulfian aesthetics mirror the surrounding political climate suggest a connection between the government, the intellectual sphere and Rulfo’s work. The real impact of a government and its intellectual policies on literary creation is of course impossible to ascertain.

2.1.2 Land Reform and Education Reinforce the State’s Power

At the same time as the State endeavored to consolidate power over the intellectual realm through prizes and scholarships, it attempted to control the land through agrarian reform programs and education. One of Alemán’s 1945 campaign speeches in the city of Cuernavaca, for example, implies that the government would control rural areas and its inhabitants “mediante una más adecuada organización del medio campesino” (128). In other words, that the government would re-invigorate the agrarian reform program that the 1917 Constitution had set in motion. Campesinos were to receive six hectares of irrigable or naturally humid land each, and these individual land grants would become part of ejidos (Aguado López 45-7). The government never explicitly defined the ejido, other than as some kind of communally held land, land reform was carried out very slowly, officials were easily bribed and corruptible, and the land that was eventually distributed was often of below average quality (Walsh Sanderson 10, 95).

“Nos han dado la tierra” alludes to the problems inherent in Mexico’s agrarian reform program and to the way the government sought to control campesinos through the CNC, an institution that largely ignored their interests (Agustín Tragicomedia mexicana 1 73; Aguilar

Camín and L. Meyer 212). The CNC, as well as agrarian reform, institutionalized the differences in power between the government and campesinos. As Nila Gutiérrez Marrone has observed, in

“Nos han dado la tierra,” narrative techniques, specifically, subject pronouns used to describe the interaction between the campesinos and the land reform official, reflect this pronounced power dynamic (65). For example, the rural men protest to a land reform official. “Pero, señor delegado, la tierra está deslavada, dura. No creemos que el arado se entierre en esa como cantera que es la tierra del Llano” (18, emphasis mine). I would add that since it is highly improbable that four men could speak together, the plural “creemos” suggests that they could not exert autonomy in this situation. Their collective perspective highlights their powerlessness as it contrasts with the narrator-protagonist’s reflection on the official’s third-person singular speech.

“El delegado no venía a conversar con nosotros. Nos puso los papeles en la mano y nos dijo: -

No se vayan a asustar por tener tanto terreno para ustedes solos” (17-18, emphasis mine).

Elsewhere, the narrator-protagonist uses the third-person plural to characterize the official and further distance him from the rural men. “Nos dijeron: - Del pueblo para acá es de ustedes” (17).

In this interaction, the land reform official could speak, but the rural men could not: “no nos dejaron decir nuestras cosas” (17). Thus, the story contrasts the rural men’s first-person plural reflections with the land reform official’s third-person singular and plural speech to underline the fact that the land reform official acted as a vehicle of the government’s power in order to subject the campesino characters, interpellating them as a collective.

At the same time, as mentioned in the first chapter, the government struggled to subject rural people through a public education system. An undated report from the Ministry of

Education summarizes the goals of this program:

1. La escuela rural, como agencia civilizadora, tiende a mejorar el sistema de la

comunidad en que actúa.

2. Pero este alto fin no puede ser logrado únicamente por aquella – institución, porque el

problema de la vida campesina rosune [sic] cuestiones que propiamente quedan fuera de

la escuela rural.

3. Dar al campesino mayor bienestar, ponerlo en consideraciones de gozar de las

comodidades que ofrece la civilización actual, hacer al suelo más productivo, mejorar los

sistemas de trabajo, lograr que la comunidad disfrute de mejores hogares, transformar la

vida doméstica haciéndola más deseable y crear hábitos que tiendan a la conservación de

la salud y de la vida…

4. Pero es obvio al reconocer que la acción aislada de la fuerza transformadora que

presenta la escuela, resulta limitada e insuficiente ante la magnitud de los problemas de la

población campesina y ante los anhelos de la liberación que en ella palpitan.

5. Es decir, la elevación de la vida rural no es únicamente un problema escolar, pues para

ser resuelto reclama la interacción del economista, del ingeniero, del higienista, del

sociólogo, etc. Y el consorcio de las agencias que el Estado tiene para tal fin.

6. Es menester, pues, realizar una obra educativa que amplíe e intensifique la iniciada por

la escuela rural, obra impulsora que ha de inspirarse en las necesidades más urgentes de la

comunidad, capacitando a esta para que las satisfaga y logre su desarrollo integral.

(Psicopedagogía e Higiene)50

This report acknowledges that the educational system is one of several ways the government sought to influence rural people, and was based on the assumption that campesino lifestyle is problematic, underdeveloped and needy, and, as such, in urgent need of liberation, health and civilization. Here the Ministry of Education’s department of Psicopedagogía e Higiene also asserts that the government would employ professionals such as teachers, sociologists and health works to develop the community as a whole.

“Luvina” reflects the Mexican government’s ongoing influence in the educational system, and the tendency for the government to see rural Mexico as underdeveloped and in need of civilization. In this story, the relationship between the rural characters and the teacher corroborates these assumptions. We see how a teacher acts on governmental power and seeks to subject the rural people he has been sent to develop and improve. An argument between the teacher and Luvina’s residents illustrates this tension. The teacher tries to persuade the townspeople that the government is benevolent and the rural people disagree, telling the teacher:

– ‘Dices que el Gobierno nos ayudará, profesor? ¿Tú no conoces al Gobierno?

‘Les dije que sí

–‘También nosotros lo conocemos. Da esa casualidad. De lo que no sabemos nada es de

la madre del Gobierno.

50 The SEP archives are not always chronologically organized; the box’s label and contents imply that this document came from the 1920s or 1930s. However, I cannot state this with certainty.

‘Yo les dije que era la Patria. Ellos movieron la cabeza diciendo que no. Y se rieron…

Pelaron sus dientes molenques y me dijeron que no, que el Gobierno no tenía madre.

(102)

The campesino worldview in “Luvina” complicates Franco’s hermaphrodite notion of the madre patria as both parents; here, we see that the campesinos’ separation between Patria and government suggests that the motherless government is worse than useless. After all, “[e]l Señor

[gobierno] ese sólo se acuerda de ellos cuando alguno de sus muchachos ha hecho alguna fechoría acá abajo. Entonces manda por él hasta Luvina y se lo matan. De ahí en más no saben si existe” (102-3). Luvina’s residents do not think that their community has the same “urgent necessities” that the Ministry of Education’s report would have us believe. The campesinos critique the government rather than clamoring for the arrival of teachers, engineers or public health workers, who would likely conceive of them as a mass onto which they could project their ideas.

2.1.3 Consolidating Power in Presidential and Narrative Offices

In addition to attempting to diffuse its reach throughout rural Mexico through teachers and land reform officials, under President Ruiz Cortines, the Mexican government further consolidated power in the presidential office. To do so, it appropriated power from Congress, judicial sectors, the army and other civic actors (Aguilar Camín and L. Meyer 212). Historians

Olga Pellicer de Brody and José Luis Reyna add that throughout the 1950s, the PRI continued to appropriate power from affiliated institutions. Even as the number of labour organizations in

Mexico increased, the Mexican government used its relationship with the largest union, the

CTM, as a way to influence Mexicans (Pellicer de Brody and Reyna 74-6). Moreover, the government would dissolve groups, such as the Federación de Partidos de Pueblo, when they

85 became large enough to be threatening (Pellicer de Brody and Reyna 57, 60). The first person plural narrative voice in each of Rulfo’s stories points to this concentration of power, and in some cases, these voices’ madness, illness and delusion criticize this process.

The first-person narrator-protagonists in “Nos han dado la tierra” and “Talpa,” which confuse the protagonist and those that accompany him and negate other characters’ individuality, are of special interest. In the stories’ context, the government sought to turn networks of workers, campesinos and other Mexicans into unified PRI-affiliated groups it would then be able to control. The monopolizing voices in Rulfo’s stories mirror this power struggle, as they, too, attempt to draw on the voices of others to present a unified entity. Hence, I read these narrative voices as analogous to and a way to reflect on the consolidation of power in the Mexican government.

“Nos han dado la tierra” sets a scene that could be in almost any desert and told by almost anyone: “[d]espués de tantas horas de caminar sin encontrar ni una sombra de árbol, ni una raíz de nada, se oye el ladrar de los perros” (15).51 Then, the story personalizes this event without sympathizing with a particular character: “[u]no ha creído a veces… que nada habría después”

(15). This perspective allows us to better understand the narrator’s sense of desperation and longing to find other people. He adopts a first-person plural perspective to tell us: “[h]emos venido caminando desde el amanecer” (15). After conflating his point of view with his unnamed companions, this narrator separates himself from the group. He tells us “[y] a mí se me ocurre que hemos caminado más de lo que llevamos andando” (15, emphasis mine). The remainder of the story returns to the “plural” perspective. As the story progresses, then, the anonymous

51 This citation reminds us of the title of another of Rulfo’s stories in El llano en llamas, “No se oye ladrar los perros.”

86 narrative voice personalizes the account and presents the experiences of his companions as his own. This narrator is once a member of the people and a voice that speaks on their behalf.

The narrative voice in “Talpa” also consolidates power as its narrator-protagonist employs the first-person singular and plural perspectives. He introduces the story: “la cosa es que a Tanilo Santos entre Natalia y yo lo matamos” (55-6, emphasis mine). After Tanilo dies, the narrator-protagonist tells us that he and Natalia buried him “en un pozo de la tierra de Talpa, sin que nadie nos ayudara, cuando ella y yo, los dos solos, juntamos nuestras fuerzas” (55, emphasis mine). The anonymous narrator-protagonist in both stories assumes other characters’ actions as if they were his own, fusing his first-person singular perspective with first-person plural pronouns.

This could be the only way to relate these characters’ actions; however, the way the anonymous first-person narrator describes the actions of others without giving others opportunities to interject acts analogously to the ongoing consolidation of power outside the text and thus offers insight into the literary text and the historical process.

“Macario” and “Luvina” are told in first-person singular narrative voices that imply that their narrators are delusional, animalistic or ill. If we consider that a narrative voice can parallel a significant power in its context of production, then these first-person narrative voices can be thought to relate to the Mexican presidential office. Earlier critics of Rulfo’s work, such as Luis

Fernando Veas Mercado, confirm this parallel relationship. Veas Mercado suggests that

Macario’s voice “refleja a una sociedad enferma que condena al hombre a monologar perpetuamente” (“Fundamentos lingüísticos” 280). By building on the connection between a sick or fevered narrative voice and social critique, I posit that first-person narrative voices in

“Macario” and “Luvina,” which emerge in stories published at the same time as a consolidation

87 of power in the presidential office, coincide with this process, and, as fevered voices, can critique it.

The narrative voice in “Macario” appears fevered or mad, connects Macario to animals and characterizes him with an insatiable hunger. This fevered speech begins as soon as Macario introduces himself to us, declaring, “[e]stoy sentado junto a la alcantarilla aguardando a que salgan las ranas” (9). He then adds one point after another without developing a clear idea:

Las ranas son verdes de todo a todo, menos en la panza. Los sapos son negros. Las ranas

son buenas para hacer de comer con ellas. Los sapos no se comen; pero yo me los he

comido también, aunque no se coman. (9)

This opening paragraph creates the impression of jumping frogs by piling one clause on top of another, especially as “Macario” hardly ever leaves room for a break, except the occasional ellipsis or comma: “[p]ero, a todo esto, es mi madrina la que me manda hacer las cosas…Yo quiero más a Felipa que a mi madrina” (9). This reinforces the narrative’s feverish quality. The narrator-protagonist then reveals his reputed madness:

Dicen en la calle que yo estoy loco por jamás se me acaba el hambre…dizque luego hago

locuras. Un día inventaron que yo andaba ahorcando a alguien; que le apreté el pescuezo

a una señora nada más por no más. Yo no me acuerdo. (10)

Reading the insatiably hungry, supposedly crazy, perhaps violent and certainly unusual narrator- protagonist in “Macario” alongside other narrative voices in El llano en llamas suggests that the consolidation of power in a narrator is fevered and mad. By considering this consolidation of voices within the literary text alongside a historical process whereby the Mexican government consolidated power in itself, particularly in the presidential office, we might argue that the text

88 suggests that this process is similarly fevered or mad. The character in the text, however, is not equivalent to the powerful Mexican government that influenced millions of people. Rather, this analogy maintains that the powerless child’s voice can characterize this government.

“Luvina” reinforces this sense of madness as its first-person narrator speaks to an unnamed and perhaps nonexistent audience. While the narrator in “Luvina” is a more powerful figure than Macario, neither narrator is a direct reflection of the presidential office in either story’s context of production. “Luvina” opens as the narrator tells his audience, “[y]a mirará usted ese viento que sopla sobre Luvina” (94). Other parts of the story suggest that there is no audience: after the first-person narrator describes his experience in Luvina, an omniscient voice tells us that “[e]l hombre aquel que hablaba se quedó callado un rato, mirando hacia afuera” (95).

The subsequent sentence would logically describe the listener; however, this sentence never appears. At the end of the story, we are no closer to meeting the audience. “El hombre que miraba a los comejenes se recostó sobre la mesa y se quedó dormido” (104). Françoise Perus sustains that the descriptions “hablaba” and “miraba” distinguish the narrator from another man; she maintains that the doubtful audience exists (Juan Rulfo 147). Such an argument points out that the first-person narrator is overpowering at best. This delusional or overpowering first- person narrator, then, can be read as a critique of the way the Mexican government consolidated power throughout the 1950s. At the same time, as these narrators are relatively powerless characters, such as a child and a man in a bar, they critique the machinations within the PRI from this position.

2.1.4 The Indomitable Madre Patria

Returning to the gendered language introduced earlier, I discuss the land as a feminine force that has an ambiguous relationship with the madre patria. Everardo González’s recent

89 documentary Cuates de Australia (Drought), filmed in the state of Coahuila, not far from Jalisco, provides a rich visual and auditory example of the land Rulfo’s stories describe.52 In the film, dust covers everything. It reduces people to caring for their most basic needs, hunger and thirst, and highlights their similarities to animals (Cuates de Australia). Rulfo’s photographs reinforce this landscape’s desolation. They show harsh conditions, dust and lack of water (Fuentes et al.

115, 116-117). Indeed, as Monsiváis has observed, in Rulfo’s stories, and I would add, his photographs, “el clima acaba incluso con las ganas de conversar y apoya los derrumbamientos internos con el calor, resequedad, humedad, polvo” (“Sí, tampoco los muertos” 36). In spite of its harsh nature, the land is essential to rural livelihood and an important source of campesino identity.

Three photographs of Mixe women in Oaxaca in 1955 introduce us to the llano.53

According to Dan Russek, Rulfo’s photography, like his writing, offers an aesthetic interpretation of rural Mexico (20). As such, Russek’s approach lays the foundation for my consideration of Rulfo’s literature and photography side-by-side. These photographed women, in traditional white dresses and checked head coverings attempt to subdue dusty fields with their hoes (“Mujeres mixes en reposo, 1955,” “Grupo de mujeres mixes barbechando, 1955,” and

52 The majority of Rulfo’s stories are set in Jalisco. An exception is “Paso del Norte,” which describes Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua and El Paso, Texas (119-126). Rulfo’s photographs are taken throughout the country, and in this chapter I focus on several photographs taken in the state of Oaxaca.

53 Interest in Rulfo’s photography has increased in recent years: the first exhibit was in 1960 in Guadalajara, then after a twenty-year break, the Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City exhibited 100 of Rulfo’s photographs. In 1986, the Caja de Pensiones in Barcelona mounted a comparative exhibit with Pere Calders. In 1989, the Franz Mayer Museum in Mexico City exhibited “Nada de esto es sueño.” In 1992, the Museo Nacional de los Ferrocarriles Mexicanos in Puebla exhibits 100 of his photos. In 1994, the National Architecture Museum exhibits a series of photographs entitled “Arquitectura en México.” Two years later, the Diego Rivera Museum in Mexico City exhibited “La Ciudad de Juan Rulfo” and then in 1999, a museum in Monterrey exhibited 30 stills from the 1955 film, La Escondida and the 1960 film El despojo. These and other images were presented in Dijon, France and Innsbruck, Austria, that same year. In 2001 “Mexico: Juan Rulfo, fotógrafo” was exhibited in Barcelona, and then toured a number of cities in Europe, Mexico and South America. In 2006, Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, presented a small selection of Rulfo’s photographs (González Boixo 255-259).

“Tres mujeres mixes barbechando, 1955”, Jiménez et al 94-6). The “Grupo de mujeres” portrays several women. Three of them are in an almost linear formation in the foreground; they are reduced to sameness under the photographer’s lens and the difficulty of subduing the llano. Two more groups of women perform the same work from the foreground into the never-ending dust.

“Nos han dado la tierra” describes this llano, portraying it as “una llanura rajada de grietas y arroyos secos” (15), and “Talpa” brings the dust and heat associated with the pilgrimage to the

Virgin of Talpa to life, and each story presents Jalisco’s particular vocabulary, all of which demonstrate the land’s overpowering nature.

In “Nos han dado la tierra,” the land covers characters with dust and reduces them to a single body part, which prevents them from exerting an embodied subjectivity that would encompass personal experience, mental capacity and biological functions. This dehumanizing process acts in a similar way to the Church or family structure in Rulfo’s stories, and, for this reason, is highlighted here. At the same time, as a non-human entity, it cannot be criticized in the same way for dehumanizing characters. The narrator in “Nos han dado la tierra” describes a dry mouth and tongue caused by the desert’s conditions: “[u]no platica aquí y las palabras se calientan en la boca con el calor de afuera, y se le resecan a uno en la lengua hasta que acaban con el resuello” (16). The land has taken away his ability to elaborate on the heat’s effects on his and other characters’ bodies. Later, the story highlights the characters’ stomachs in order to explore their hunger and their thirst. “[Y]a hubiéramos probado el agua verde del río, y paseado nuestros estómagos por las calles del pueblo para que se les bajara la comida” (17). The land replaces characters’ bodies with a single body part. It then covers them in dust:

Sube polvo de nosotros como si fuera un atajo de mulas lo que bajara por allí… Después

de venir durante once horas pisando la dureza del llano, nos sentimos muy a gusto

envueltos en aquella cosa que brinca sobre nosotros y sabe a tierra. (20)

In addition to animalizing the characters, this comparison reminds us of Catholic burial ceremonies, which emphasize that humans are made from dust, and return to dust when they die.

In the story, the land further coincides with Catholic burial and becomes more menacing as we learn that it houses reptiles rather than mammals. “Solo unas cuantas lagartijas salen a asomar la cabeza por encima de sus agujeros, y luego que sienten la tatema del sol corren a esconderse en la sombrita de una piedra” (17). As the characters in “Nos han dado la tierra” walk across this land, its dust absorbs them and they acquire its likeness.

The land in “Talpa,” just like in “Nos han dado la tierra,” exerts significant power over its characters and makes it difficult for the characters to use any of their non-physical functions. For example, “[l]os ojos seguían la polvareda; daban en el polvo como si tropezaran contra algo que no se podía traspasar. Y el cielo siempre gris, como una mancha gris y pesada” (60). “Talpa” then reinforces the connection between dust, the llano and death we saw in “Nos han dado la tierra.” The narrator and Natalia, for example, work quickly to bury Tanilo because they were afraid his smell would frighten people (55). As they bury him with their hands, they themselves risk being captured by the dust (55). The land thus eliminates these characters’ higher functions and, through their physical actions, evokes death.

As “Talpa” explores its characters’ physical responses to the llano’s heat, it highlights

Natalia’s body, depersonalizes the narrator-protagonist’s experience, eliminates his higher functions and animalizes both characters.

La tierra sobre la que dormíamos estaba caliente. Y la carne de Natalia, la esposa de mi

hermano Tanilo, se calentaba en seguida con el calor de la tierra. Luego aquellos dos

calores juntos quemaban y lo hacían a uno despertar de su sueño. (58)

The heat emphasizes Natalia’s body to such an extent that she becomes mere “carne.” At first,

Natalia’s “carne” gets its heat from the earth, so that it does not seem to have its own life. But then, the “dos calores juntos quemaban” so that the narrator’s sexual desire for Natalia blends into his response to the heat in general, reinforcing a sense of animalization. In a similar vein, the narrator describes the pilgrims’ arrival at a body of water, “[z]ambullíamos la cabeza acalenturada y renegrida en el agua verde, y por un momento de todos nosotros salía un humo azul, parecido al vapor que sale de la boca con el frío” (60). The pilgrimage reduces them to the need to care for their bodies as if they were animals. Finally, the story likens these characters to the lowest animal, worms: “igual que si fuéramos un hervidero de gusanos apelotonados bajo el sol, retorciéndonos entre la cerrazón del polvo que nos encerraba a oídos en la misma vereda y nos llevaba como acorralados” (60). The land in “Talpa” is an oppressive entity whose dust and heat de-personalize the characters’ experiences.

The land is likewise a significant force in “Macario,” as it disempowers its narrator- protagonist by marking his body. Macario tells us that in his room, “[l]lueven piedras grandes y filosas por todas partes. Y luego hay que remendar la camisa y esperar muchos días a que se remienden las rajaduras de la cara o de las rodillas” (12). If this were not sufficient proof that the land is a dehumanizing entity in the story, it then becomes part of Macario’s self-hatred and helps him punish his own body:

Uno da de topes contra los pilares del corredor horas enteras y la cabeza no se hace nada,

aguanta sin quebrarse. Y uno da de topes contra el suelo; primero despacito, después más

recio y aquello suena como un tambor. (12)

The land acts so violently towards Macario that he becomes almost embedded in it, mimicking the land’s patterns by throwing himself at his floor and pillars in his hallway.

“Luvina” also demonstrates that the land is a significant power. In this story, the land is related to a cyclical time that prevents rural characters from moving forward. In the town of

Luvina,

Nadie lleva la cuenta de las horas ni a nadie le preocupa cómo van amontonándose los

años. Los días comienzan y se acaban. Solamente el día y la noche hasta el día de la

muerte, que para ellos es una esperanza. (101)

To escape the confines of this time before their inevitable death, many young men have left the rural area, so that:

Sólo quedan los puros viejos y las mujeres solas, o con un marido que anda donde sólo

Dios sabe donde…Vienen de vez en cuando como las tormentas de que le hablaba; se oye

un murmullo en todo el pueblo cuando regresan y uno como gruñido cuando se van…

Dejan el costal de bastimento para los viejos y plantan otro hijo en el vientre de sus

mujeres, y ya nadie vuelve a saber de ellos hasta el año siguiente, y a veces nunca… Es la

costumbre. Allí le dicen la ley, pero es lo mismo. (101-2)

Here the story focuses on rural people’s reproduction and intrinsically relates it to seasonal existence, social custom and rural law, which demonstrates that within the literary text, rural

94 characters, particularly women, do not have the opportunity to exercise judgment over their biological functions.

The cyclical existence also compartmentalizes rural people, makes them invisible and reduces them to their thirst. “Luvina” first compartmentalizes the rural women through the reflections of the narrator-protagonist’s unnamed wife: “allí tras las rendijas de esa puerta veo brillar los ojos que nos miran…Han estado asomándose para acá…Míralas. Veo las bolas brillantes de sus ojos…” (99). In contrast to the prevalent blindness in Revueltas’ stories,

“Luvina” highlights these characters’ “working” eyes to suggest mental function. Yet, the story negates an embodied subjectivity encompassing body and mind by then portraying these women as “figuras negras sobre el negro fondo de la noche” (100). These women, like the three women in the photograph “Actriz de reparto de La Escondida” are likely dressed in black (Jiménez et al.

99). In “Actriz de reparto,” a woman sits in the foreground, practically covered by her shawl. A second woman in black blends into a cactus plant, and a third is barely distinguishable from the plants that surround her. The power of nature increases when we read this photograph alongside the fence of cacti in “Calle de Mitla, Oaxaca, 1955” (Jiménez et al. 113). The women in Rulfo’s story are prepared to get water from a distant well, like the protagonist of “Mujer en la fuente de

Talhuitoltepec, Oaxaca, 1955,” who draws water from a public well (Jiménez et al. 85). As they are about to leave the town, the women in “Luvina” make the noise of “un aletear de murciélagos en la oscuridad, muy cerca de nosotros. De murciélagos de grandes alas que rozaban el suelo”

(100). Examining the story and photograph alongside one another creates the impression, within the aesthetics of “Luvina,” that addressing the town’s most basic need, thirst, eliminates the women’s opportunity for consent and leads them to acquire bat-like characteristics.

Rulfo’s stories contrast the lack of will or consenting agency of these and other female characters while maintaining that the untameable or feminine madre llano cannot be subsumed by the government’s agrarian reform program or educational system. The land’s dust and heat move through characters so that they are subject to it. Indeed, the llano metonymically reduces characters in each story to single body parts, likens them to animals and limits them to their biological functions and basic needs. The collection of stories, moreover, creates connections between subjected characters’ bodies, so that Natalia’s tears can remind us of the bat-like women in search of water and Tanilo’s burial evokes the pilgrims and the men in search of their newly granted land.

2.1.5 The Catholic Church and the Way of the Virgin

In El llano en llamas, the Catholic Church is as oppressive as the land and the government. In the first chapter, we saw how Revueltas’ representations of the Cristero War pointed to ongoing conflict between the Church and the State. By the 1940s, when Rulfo’s stories were first published, this conflict had ended. The Church was no longer an independent actor; it had submitted to constitutional restrictions and was embedded in State structures (Muro

González 543-4). Indeed, Jean Meyer states by the 1950s, the Church was primarily a political power that failed to provide for the masses (“Religión” 717). This suggests that one of the functions of the Catholic Church, specifically, the mass, priest’s homilies and people’s devotion to saints and the Virgin that we see in Rulfo’s work, were a tool whereby the government, via the

Church, could influence Mexican people.

Rulfo’s stories, however, separate the government from the Church. This coincides with

Victor Gabriel Muro González’s assertions. According to the sociologist of religion, the Church resurged as the government readmitted Church leaders to Mexico and allowed them to reopen

96 their Seminaries (Muro González 546). Historian Sara Luna Elizarrarás confirms this separation and demonstrates that the Church conformed to the government’s values on its own terms. In the middle of 1953, for instance, the Catholic Church and related organizations began a moralization campaign, which proposed discussing the moral actions required for complete “social health,” such as having children (Luna Elizarrarás 146). This attempt to transform society was to take place through the private sphere of family, schools and health centres (Luna Elizarrarás 146). In this case, the Church and government coincided in their emphasis on virility, but the Church appealed to religious beliefs, such as decency, and promoted having children as a result of this virility, rather than an end in itself.

An abandoned church in “Luvina” and the photograph “Portada norte del temple de

Xochimilco, c. 1950” allude to this evolving relationship (Jiménez et al. 69). The church in

“Luvina” “[e]ra un jacalón vacío, sin puertas, nada más con unos socavones abiertos y un techo resquebrajado por donde se colaba el aire como por un cedazo” (99). The fact that there is only a broken-down church in the town might hearken back to 19th century liberal reforms that expropriated Church property throughout Mexico. Since these buildings generally then became government offices, this church building could also suggest that the land simply overpowers the

Church through dust and wind. The photograph’s aesthetics confirm this latter suspicion. It focuses on what was once a beautiful doorway and now bears the impression of curtains. The doorway is filled with pockmarked holes that look like gunshots and the outer layer of cement is coming away on both sides of the door, revealing the brick underneath. In spite of the abandoned state of the church in “Luvina” and the decrepit doorway in the photograph, religion influences the teacher and his family in “Luvina,” and they seek refuge in the abandoned church. The wind enters the town’s church and wreaks havoc on the Stations of the Cross, “unas cruces grandes y duras hechas con palo de mezquite que colgaban de las paredes a todo lo largo de la iglesia,

97 amaradas con alambres que rechinaban a cada sacudida del viento como si fuera un rechinar de dientes” (100). The fact that the government official and his family found shelter in this church building suggests that the Catholic Church continued to influence the public sphere of the government and the private sphere of the family.

This emphasis on the private sphere suggests a relationship between the Church and the feminine. In spite of the Catholic Church’s misogynistic structure, women tended to carry out most of its moralistic work. Moreover, Mexican Catholicism, as we saw in the first chapter, centers on a powerful female figure, the Virgin of Guadalupe. According to Octavio Paz’s landmark 1950 essay El laberinto de la soledad, which interprets a context that coincides with

Rulfo’s stories, Mexicans venerate the Virgin because she is a universal mother who allows them to cope with their circumstances; indeed, she is the source of many popular religious practices that counter some official Catholic programs. Paz states that the Virgin is “la intermediaria, la mensajera entre el hombre desheredado y el poder desconocido, sin rostro” (Paz 77). People feel comfortable talking to her, and feel confident that she can intervene on their behalf to the unknowable, all-knowing God. Moreover, the Virgin, historically constructed as unlike all other women, became an ideal to which women should aspire. Thus, women embedded in the Catholic religious structure, such as female worshippers, and nuns working in schools and health centres, may have modeled themselves after the Virgin to assert power over others. Thus, as companions and supporters, these women could complement the Catholic understanding of virile masculinity, and challenge the government’s power.

Rulfo’s stories reflect this context by presenting characters that express their devotion to the Virgin, through pilgrimage to a basilica marking another of the Virgin’s apparitions in

Mexico, the Virgin of Talpa. In “Talpa,” representations of the Virgin of Talpa and the way the

98 priest relates to the worshippers in the Basílica act on Catholic religious power to subject pilgrims and worshippers. For instance, in the story, the Virgin relates to Tanilo exclusively on the basis of his physical wounds, which highlights his embodiment. “Ella sabía hacer eso: lavar las cosas, ponerlo todo nuevo de nueva cuenta como un campo recién llovido. Y allí, frente a

Ella, se acabarían sus males; nada le dolería ni le volvería a doler más” (56). The Virgin’s power, moreover, is concentrated on her ability to physically heal Tanilo. Once Tanilo arrives at the

Virgin’s Basílica in the city of Talpa, he worships her by modifying his physical appearance so that he looks the same as the other pilgrims. He takes off his shoes, puts his shirtsleeves around his feet, bandages his eyes and makes nopal cacti spines into a crown. This penitence reduces him to “aquella cosa tan llena de cataplasmas y de hilos oscuros de sangre que dejaba en el aire, al pasar, un olor agrio como de animal muerto” (63). His crown imitates Jesus’ crown of thorns, signals his submission to religious power and reminds us of the women in Rulfo’s photographs who appeared so overpowered by their environment that they blended into the cacti that surrounded them. Then, when the pilgrims as a whole worship the Virgin, the story likens them to animals. In the church, Tanilo becomes part of a mass, animalistic body “[que] soltó rezando toda al mismo tiempo, con un ruido igual al de muchas avispas espantadas por el humo” (64).

Tanilo and those that surround him are then reduced to a single body part. Tanilo, “todavía con la sonaja repicando entre sus manos salpicadas de sangre,” (63) appears to become his hands. The others become their feet as they dance and worship: “aquellos pies que rodaban sobre las piedras y brincaban aplastando la tierra” (63). As these pilgrims are caught up in their physical movement, they are completely unaware of Tanilo. In a context that ignores Tanilo as an individual, the priest preaches to these worshippers from a distance, “allá arriba del público”

(64). The formality of his speech, which includes expressions such as “[n]o se ensordece su ternura ni ante los lamentos ni las lágrimas,” shows that the Church does not know how to

99 communicate with its followers from lower social classes (64). Moreover, the priest’s assumption of the first person plural perspective, “[l]a Virgen nuestra, nuestra madre, que no quiere saber nada de nuestros pecados” (64, emphasis mine), mirrors Catholic prayers such as the Our Father and the Hail Mary, and, like them, involves the congregation without paying attention to them.54 The remainder of the priest’s speech focuses on the worshippers’ sins, illnesses and tired bodies rather than their individual complexities. Hence, in “Talpa,” the

Church, the Virgin of Talpa, the worship experience in her Basílica and the priest that directs it focus on the characters’ bodies to such an extent that they dehumanize them.

Another priest’s homily underscores the distance between the Church and its followers.

In “Macario,” the priest asserts that “[e]l camino de las cosas buenas está lleno de luz. El camino de las cosas malas es oscuro” (12). As a result, the protagonist becomes obsessed with the sinful nature of his own body, and reveals that he considers himself to be replete with demons (11). To counteract his fear of hell, he eats incessantly and voluntarily surrounds himself with religious imagery. He wears a scapular, a religious icon, around two of his most vulnerable and indispensable body parts, his neck and his heart (14). Representatives of the Church in

“Macario” thus lead Macario to obsess over his body and encourage him to discipline it through particular clothes and rituals. By placing the priests’ sermons in “Talpa” and “Macario” alongside of each story’s emphasis on Macario and Tanilo’s bodies, we see a connection between these two characters. Their experiences in church remind us of the teacher and his frightened family who prayed in “Luvina,” even though there was no one to whom they could

54 This homily may also reflect the broader tendencies of Catholicism prior to the Second Vatican Council’s emphasis on bringing the Church to the people by saying mass in the local language, rather than Latin, by having the priest face the congregation as he consecrated mass, and encouraging Catholics to actively participate in the Eucharist by taking both bread and wine.

100 pray. Through a particular literary representation of the characters’ experiences, I argue that religious imagery in Rulfo’s work highlights links between an oppressive church hierarchy and the creation of a collective body.

2.1.6 Family Structure and the Way of Virginity

One of the ways the Church was to carry out its moralizing mission was through the family, which I have grouped with the reactionary or “feminine” Church, although in the

Mexican patriarchal familial structure, men have more power than women. In the 1950s, the masculine ideal was based on the urban and modern president Ruiz Cortines and women could either embody the image of his respectable maternal-virginal companion or whores. Even the previous president, Alemán, who was the epitome of the high life, required this type of companion. A 1945 campaign speech to a women’s convention, in which he generously declared that women might enter public activities provided that they would not abandon the home, exemplifies this attitude. He stated that women should act as “la madre incomparable, la esposa abnegada y hacedosa, la hermana leal y la hija recatada” (Alemán 51). The feminine ideal was thus to better others, through a public or private maternal role (Luna Elizarrarás 152). According to Paz, women could either follow la Llorona or la Chingada (68). In Paz’s scheme, La Llorona, a wailing ghost that captures wayward children, represents the long-suffering Mexican mother

(68). La Chingada, on the other hand, refers to la Malinche, the interpreter for Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés. Since she was raped by Cortés, she has been blamed for the downfall of the Aztec empire (Paz 68). These pervasive and stereotypical narratives are related to a society in which men were to follow a certain vision of masculinity that involved violence, domination and power, and women were to remain respectably closed. Confined by these narratives, a man could act in a masculine way and violently chingar others, or in a feminine way, and risk losing power. Even if women, or feminized men, were to remain “respectably

101 closed,” they continually risked being violated, ser chingado (Paz 70-1).55 To avoid this risk, women were to stay in the private sphere of the home, as virgins or mothers, Alemán’s “hija recatada” or “esposa abnegada.” If these women encroached too far in traditionally masculine realms, they were chastised and perceived as whores. If men became too feminine, as chingados, their actions became less significant. Speaking some four decades later, and to the US context,

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick asserts that to avoid this disorder, they should seek guidance from masculine figures as mothers “have nothing to contribute to this process of masculine validation, and women are reduced in the light of its urgency to a null set” (22-23). Indeed, according to

Robert McKee Irwin, elaborate word-play games encourage men to become chingón as weaker men, like women, are chingados (195).

Macario’s feminization corresponds with Sedgwick’s observations, as in the story, this process is intimately related to his maternal figures, in particular, to his godmother and her religious practice. She had given him his scapular and regularly prays to images of saints in her room (14). Surrounded by feminized religious practice, in a community that considered him a lesser human being because of his child-like qualities, violence, madness or potential cognitive disability, Macario’s experiences of Church are also feminized.

Mi madrina no me deja salir solo a la calle. Cuando me saca a dar la vuelta es para

llevarme a la iglesia a oír misa. Allí me acomoda cerquita de ella y me amarra las manos

con las barbas de su rebozo. (10)

The Church, like his godmother’s shawl, surrounds Macario to feminize him. We are reminded of Sedgwick’s assertions that the desire to acquire feminine characteristics is the symbol of a

55 Emily Hind explores these terms in relation to Castellanos’ work and contemporary Mexico (61-2).

102 deficiency for a boy (22-3). In accordance with these ideas, as the feminized Church and home surround him, he becomes afraid of the outside world, undoubtedly a deficiency for this male child.

En seguida que me dan de comer me encierro en mi cuarto y atranco bien la puerta para

que no den conmigo los pecados mirando que aquello está a oscuras. Y ni siquiera prendo

el ocote para ver por dónde se me andan subiendo las cucarachas. . . Pero no prendo el

ocote. No vaya a suceder que me encuentren desprevenido los pecados por andar con el

ocote prendido. (13)

Indeed, he only leaves his room when it is dark outside: “[y]o me levanto y salgo de mi cuarto cuando todavía está a oscuras. Barro la calle y me meto otra vez en mi cuarto antes que me agarre la luz del día” (12). Macario, who has close and dependent relationships with female characters because of his disability or child-like qualities, largely remains indoors, which, in the case of the story, is a feminized space that heightens religious fear.

Fluidity and open sores also point to the negative effects of feminization of another male character, Tanilo. In “Talpa,” fluids overtake Tanilo’s body and he becomes like a woman, who, given their biological features of menstruation and childbearing, have tended to be associated with fluids and openness. The story maintains that “[e]l cuerpo de Tanilo… lleno por dentro y por fuera de un hervidero de moscas azules que zumbaban como si fuera un gran ronquido que saliera de la boca de él” (65). First, blisters appear on his arms and legs. They then become open sores “por donde no salía nada de sangre y sí una cosa amarilla como goma de copal que destilaba agua espesa” (56, emphasis mine). Each of his sores shed this “agua amarilla, llena de aquel olor que se derramaba por todos lados” (65, emphasis mine). This yellow liquid implies

103 sickness, and although it is not red, alludes to menstruation. Tanilo’s body thus attracts attention and revulsion and makes him an abject, feminized man.

Women’s tears in the same story expose the limiting effects of the virgin-mother-whore complex on women. “Talpa” begins by demonstrating the power available to women if they adopt the maternal narrative. Natalia’s biological mother is in fact so powerful that she is able to focus on Natalia and the narrator-protagonist’s bodies, and ignore their thoughts and opinions:

Natalia se metió entre los brazos de su madre y lloró largamente allí con un llanto

quedito. Era un llanto aguantado por muchos días, guardado hasta ahora que regresamos a

Zenzontla y vio a su madre y comenzó a sentirse con ganas de consuelo. (55)

Natalia’s mother, however, is not interested in learning about her daughter’s pilgrimage. She only cares about the tears that reduce Natalia to a baby: “Natalia se ha puesto a llorar sobre sus hombros [de la madre] y le ha contado de esa manera todo lo que pasó” (65). Natalia’s crying makes the narrator feel stagnant. He reveals that “yo comienzo a sentir como si no hubiéramos llegado a ninguna parte; que estamos aquí de paso, para descansar” (65). This encourages him to concentrate on physical movement: “luego seguiremos caminando. No sé para donde” (65).

When Natalia’s mother is presented in a potentially empowering maternal role, her daughter and the narrator-protagonist are reduced to their tears and their movement. This coinciding power and emphasis on Natalia and the narrator-protagonist’s bodies suggests that while the maternal narrative might be a way for female characters, such as Natalia’s mother, to gain power, in the end, as it comes at the expense of others, it limits both women’s possibilities.

This imagery of tears acknowledges that the maternal narrative is one way for women to gain some measure of power within the patriarchal system. Similarly embodied imagery in

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“Talpa” allows me to explore the “whore” narrative and associate it with the stereotypical expectation of a violent man. The story’s narrator-protagonist explains how he acts violently towards Natalia: “mis manos iban detrás de ella; primero suavemente, pero después la apretaban como si quisieran exprimirle la sangre. Así una y otra vez, noche tras noche” (58). He wants to physically overpower her by making her bleed, an action that women regularly accomplish through menstruation. As he describes this desire, the narrator-protagonist also compartmentalizes Natalia by focusing on her legs and her eyes. In the past, “le brillaban…los ojos como si fueran charcos alumbrados por la luna,” but in the present, “de pronto se destiñeron, se la borró la mirada como si la hubiera revolcado en la tierra. Y pareció no ver ya nada” (59).

Given that blindness, as we noted in the first chapter’s analysis of Revueltas’ “¿Cuánta será la oscuridad?”, can coexist with powerlessness, Natalia’s unseeing eyes could imply that other parts of her body are also dysfunctional. “Talpa” emphasizes her legs, “duras y calientes como piedras al sol del mediodía” for instance, which suggests that Natalia is sexually dysfunctional, as if her legs have been alone for a long time (56-7).56 Instead of focusing on the positive aspects of

Natalia’s breasts, blood or body, then, the story uses stone-like imagery to confirm Natalia’s purported dysfunction. “Natalia parecía estar endurecida y traer el corazón apretado para no sentirlo bullir dentro de ella” (55). “Talpa” associates Natalia with her biological functions, phallic hardness and dry land, and characterizes the narrator through his violent actions. In this way, the story allows us to see the disempowering aspects of the virgin-whore narratives for men and women.

56 This is almost like an avant la lettre allusion to the title of Octavio Paz’s 1957 poem, “Piedra de Sol.” Paz’s poem includes several sections that worship the female form, such as “voy por tu cuerpo como por el mundo, / tu vientre es una plaza soleada, / tus pechos dos iglesias donde oficia la sangre sus misterios paralelos” (“Piedra de sol”).

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These competing and contrasting views of femininity in Rulfo’s work sustain that women have less power than men in the Mexican context; the graphic imagery demonstrates the extent to which these messages oppressed Mexican women and men in the stories’ context. During the

1940s and 1950s, the government was trying to distance motherhood from religious connotations through programs for celebrating mothers, by regularizing birth certificates and by implementing daycare programs (Blum 141-2). Still, as the government continued to focus on a maternal, loving mother and dutiful daughter, it did not address the underside of these ideas, namely, the fact that this emphasis on the ideal woman furthers the virgin-mother-whore continuum, and denies women agency and choice over their own lives.

2.2 A Path of Resistance in Rulfo’s Stories

Rulfo’s work thus presents a feminized and reactionary Church and family structure through priests, sermons, the Virgin of Talpa, mothers, adulterous women and feminized male characters that contrasts with a “virile” urban government, represented by teachers, land reform officials and narrative strategies. These reactionary forces relate to the land’s natural power, even though the land, in Rulfo’s stories and photographs, acts independently of both groups. In this situation, no entity has a monopoly over power. Yet, we see how representatives of progressive and reactionary entities overpower characters by reducing them to their bodies. Characters are brutalized, animalized and sexualized, groups are reduced to specific body parts and male characters are given typically feminine characteristics. I read narrators, such as the narrator- protagonist in “Nos han dado la tierra,” in relationship to the consolidation of presidential power, and thus as a critique of their historical situation.

This idea of that these bodies point to oppression aligns my argument with other analyses of Rulfo’s work. I also propose that the repetitive nature of these shocking images might point

106 towards more than oppression. For this reason, I return to Puar’s article, “Prognosis Time,” which rejects the notion of individual subject formation and instead thinks of the possibility within collective assemblages (“Prognosis Time” 167). Puar’s emphasis on debility also lends itself to this chapter, as Rulfo’s stories portray illness, wounds, and other unusual physical behaviour. In another article, “The Cost of Getting Better,” Puar contrasts an encompassing notion of debility with a more limited understanding of disability to propose that debility inherently critiques notions of capacity and progress, while disability might participate in them.

Through this inherent critique, she suggests that we might transform these narratives (“The Cost of Getting Better” 153). Her term conviviality is key to her understanding of transformation. It foregrounds groupings of people as events or encounters and so for her, bodies form organic, rhizomatic assemblages and become Places to Meet and it is in these places that they can experience self-annihilation, radical questioning and transformation (Puar “Prognosis Time”

168).

My understanding of resistance in Rulfo’s stories is thus shaped by Puar’s emphasis on the assemblage as a place of meeting. Employing these terms allows me to interpret representations of debilitated characters in Rulfo’s stories as a critique of prevailing narratives in the literary text. By reading Rulfo’s stories in this way, we see that Rulfo’s metonymically reduced characters experience violent self-annihilation; through a radical self-questioning that we do not see in the stories, they might also experience change. Martínez Millán applies the concept of annihilation to Rulfo’s stories, independent of Puar’s theorizing.

Los personajes de Rulfo anulan toda posibilidad de esperanza, toda posibilidad de lo

único que constituiría una respuesta y esperanza tanto para ellos como para sus familiares

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de encontrar una redención propia en vida. Llevan a cabo sus deseos vitales por elección

propia aunque ello conlleve a un aniquilamiento de su esperanza. (62)

For Martínez Millán, individuals make specific choices that may annihilate others, such as the father that allows his son to die in “No oyes ladrar los perros;” whereas, for Puar, in her cultural analysis, collective bodies form assemblages that annihilate the individual. To sustain a reading of annihilation in the literary text, that incorporates both the critic and the theorist, I would add that Rulfo’s characters, particularly narrator-protagonists, damage others, and experience some level of what Martínez Millán calls an annihilation of hope. We can consider these characters as a body that collectively experiences open sores in “Talpa,” fevered speech in “Macario” and may speak to a non-existent audience in “Luvina.” As such, I interpret them as metaphorically akin to

Puar’s debility-laden assemblage. When characters in Rulfo’s stories lose individual agency as they relate to one another, such as the campesinos in “Nos han dado la tierra,” who lose their individuality through the narrator’s re-telling of their experiences, they allow us to consider the implications of ongoing repression from the Church, the Mexican government and family structure.

Given that these characters are almost hopeless when they act as individuals, they allow us to think through the possibility of challenge and change for individuals and collectives.

Studying these characters as a textually connected collective questions the usefulness of using a category such as the individual within the historically and textually specific conditions of repression. That is, stories in El llano en llamas represent unjust land reform, unequal relationships between men and women, a Church that does not pay attention to any of its followers, and this literary work arises within a historical situation in which the Mexican government attempted to consolidate power through affiliated institutions, and continued to

108 compete with the Church for authority. These stories also present the opportunity to consider how bodies that come together might point towards resistance even as these experiences violently annihilate the individual. By examining characters from different stories alongside of one another, I read them as a cross-textual assemblage of bodies. As I will point out below, as a metaphorical assemblage, these characters might challenge powerful entities within the aesthetics of these short stories. Indeed, these same characters speak, exist alongside hopeful symbols such as corn and water, vindicate the whore’s position in the virgin-whore dichotomy and create an alternative family structure. In so doing, they open a space to question the way powerful entities subject characters’ bodies within a literary text.

Characters interrupt powerful narrators with speech. In “Nos han dado la tierra,” for instance, two individual characters, Melitón and Esteban, attempt to resist the narrator- protagonist in such similar ways that they remind us of one another. Melitón declares: “Son como las cuatro de la tarde” (16). The narrator-protagonist responds by asserting, “[y]o pienso,

Melitón no tiene la cabeza en su lugar. Ha de ser el calor el que lo hace hablar así” (19). He attempts to overlook Melitón’s resistance by attributing Melitón’s lesser intellectual ability to the land’s heat. Perhaps inspired by Melitón’s partial challenge to the narrator, another character,

Esteban, confronts the way the narrator absorbs their points of view. First, we learn that he wears

“un gabán que le llega al ombligo,” a noteworthy outfit that appears to resist acquiring a group identity (19). Like Melitón, he speaks, in his case, explaining why he brought his chicken along on their journey. “Mi casa se quedó sola y sin nadie para que le diera de comer; por eso me la traje. Siempre que salgo lejos cargo con ella” (19). However, the narrator discounts Esteban’s individual appearance and speech by making him seem pregnant: “debajo del gabán

[Esteban] saca la cabeza algo así como una gallina” (19). He furthers this comparison as Esteban appears to give birth to the chicken, “[l]e desata las patas para desentumecerla” (20). This

109 feminizes Esteban, and in a stereotypical interpretation of Mexican gender relations, disempowers him. “Esteban ha vuelto a abrazar su gallina cuando nos acercamos a las primeras casas… y luego él y su gallina desaparecen detrás de unos tepemezquites” (20). Esteban’s male pregnancy also reminds us of Kristeva’s abject, in that it inspires fascination and revulsion; in accordance with her ideas, it destabilizes the borders of his individual subjectivity, and creates a textual connection with the rebellious Melitón. Their bodies become a place to meet, and so, by reading them as a metaphorical assemblage, they illustrate the obvious hopelessness of their situation and can be also understood as a challenge to it.

I read this challenge through the life-giving symbols of water and corn, which can transform the arid land. Indeed, the characters in “Nos han dado la tierra,” who hopelessly walk across the arid llano, can be thought of together with the rural characters in “Luvina,” who face a similar situation. In “Nos han dado la tierra,” these characters see a drop of rain:

Cae una gota de agua, grande, gorda, haciendo un agujero en la tierra y dejando una

plasta como la de un salivazo. Cae sola. Nosotros esperamos a que sigan cayendo más y

las buscamos con los ojos. Pero no hay ninguna más. No llueve. (16)

They despair: “nada se levantará de aquí. Ni zopilotes. [En] este blanco terrenal endurecido, donde nada mueve y por donde uno camina como reculando” (18). Conversely, the characters in

“Luvina” develop an alternate spiritual vision in similar surroundings. They understand that their life, thirst and hunger last as long as it should last. “Es el mandato de Dios” (103). The land, which had reduced them to their eyes, animalized them and dehumanized them, also becomes a source of hope (103).

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Open sores are another symbol of resistance. Of particular interest are the ways Tanilo’s feet had begun to shed blood and he displayed disgusting wounds: “Unas llagas así de grandes, que se abrían despacito, muy despacito, para luego dejar salir a borbotones un aire como de cosa echada a perder que a todos nos tenía asustados” (61). His wounds open slowly, almost tenderly, and frighten those around him and challenge religious power. Their “agua podrida,” for example, contrasts with Catholic holy water, undoubtedly in a basin at the entrance of the Basílica (58).

Once Tanilo has entered the building, his body challenges the Church, “como si fuera un estorbo” (64). Tanilo “comenzó a rezar y dejó que se le cayera una lágrima grande, salida de muy adentro, apagándole la vela que Natalia le había puesto entre sus manos” (63). In extinguishing a prayer candle, his body produces the single tear the llano received in “Nos han dado la tierra.” By highlighting connections between characters in these two stories, we can read them as an assemblage that eradicates individual characteristics in order to extinguish the

Church’s power.

Water-based imagery also resists prescribed gender roles. In “Talpa,” Natalia’s loud crying reminds us of Tanilo’s single tear in the Church and, as she shed her tears at her mother’s breast, tears join the two women. These connections strengthen Natalia’s resistance to limiting narratives for women. For instance, she enjoys sex with someone other than her husband, and, as such, participates in the “whore” narrative; yet, after she and her brother-in-law kill her husband,

Tanilo, Natalia repents by crying to her mother, and returns to being a devoted wife. In other words, she transgresses the false division between Alemán’s “esposa abnegada y hacedosa” and

Paz’s interpretation of la Malinche. Natalia then vindicates the whore’s position when she dutifully cleans Tanilo’s wounds with aguardiente (61). This action calls to mind an anonymous woman who poured expensive perfume on Jesus’ feet (Luke 7:36-50). Since this anonymous woman has been popularly conflated with the apparent prostitute Mary Magdalene, Natalia’s act

111 brings together the repentant wife and sexual passion. Ultimately, Natalia is a single character, and in spite of her actions, cannot transform prevailing narratives of gender. Her failure shows that resistance to the virgin-mother-whore continuum is needed in the world outside the text, that is, it points out the need for narratives that would allow women to act as they see fit, without risking being labelled on the basis of their sexual activity, their children or lack thereof.

Violent actions, chingar, are also a source of resistance. Macario’s feminized narrator- protagonist, for instance, acts violently towards his godmother, Felipa, and others. Critics have highlighted his situation, which Jordan calls “social alienation,” as a tragic one (121). Fidel

Sepúlveda exemplifies this critical tradition, describing Macario as:

[u]n pobrecito, deficiente mental, a quien todo el mundo externo le llega en forma

obnubilada, con los datos sobreimpresionados, que no alcanza a percibir orden, escala,

jerarquía, en lo que le rodea. Y en este sentido está aislado intelectualmente, limitado a

una vivencia turbia afectiva, dirigido volitivamente por órdenes ineludibles y por

atracciones y rechazos instintivos. (63)

In addition to the fact that other characters use Macario to perform violent tasks they find unappealing, or that the idea he acts in violent ways, perhaps to deal with his limitations, we might also propose that Macario’s violence challenges his situation. Under orders from his godmother, he sits at the doorstep of his feminized home, waiting to kill frogs, to prevent the outside from getting inside (9). Later, he shares that “[u]n día inventaron que yo andaba ahorcando a alguien; que yo le apreté el pescuezo a una señora nada más por nomás” (10). As an individual, he attempts to violently flee his situation.

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At the same time, the story presents an intercorporeal alternative to Macario’s violent behavior. Al ser chingado, it opens him to develop a relationship with Felipa, based on breast milk and saliva. “Macario” explains that Felipa breastfeeds this older child by coming into

Macario’s room and placing herself on top of him so he can drink her milk (11). Some critics, such as Sepúlveda, have highlighted the way this infantilizes Macario, and illustrates his

“deficiencia mental” (65), while others, such as Jordan, recognize this as a communicative moment in the story (122). I would add that this relationship, while perhaps a communicative experience, gains sexual overtones when the narrator tells us that Felipa would tickle the protagonist, and that he liked it when she slept next to him (11). The story further distorts the idea of Felipa as a maternal figure when a scorpion bites Felipa. The narrator-protagonist wets

Felipa’s “nalga,” a sexualized butt cheek, with his saliva, ostensibly so that she would not lose her leg (13). The grotesque relationship, which attracts our attention, even as its incestuous overtones repel us, does create a place for Macario and Felipa to meet. As it conflates and transgresses the virgin-mother and the whore narratives, the story highlights the absence of, and need for, an alternative so that no woman would be described on the basis of her sexual behaviour or motherhood.

As these characters’ bodies appear alongside representations of water, corn, tears and violence, they become a place to meet, an assemblage that may violently annihilate its individual parts. For example, according to “Nos han dado la tierra,” Melitón guesses an incorrect time of day, and so the narrator tells us that Melitón’s head can no longer in the right place because the sun has taken away his ability to think (19). The heat and telling the time wrong remind us of

Macario, a character who is known for his fevered and mad speech, and disability or child-like qualities. If we consider these characters as an assemblage, Macario and Melitón remain present even as some of their individuality is lost. Hence, as we read “Nos han dado la tierra” and

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“Macario” through Puar’s model, Melitón and Macario arise within a literary vision of oppression, and at the same time, critique their situations, within the text, in a way that is more powerful than either character’s individual criticism. In both cases, the characters confront a controlling narrative voice, the land’s oppressive heat, land reform officials, church officials and the maternal figures on whom Macario depends.

Rulfo’s stories reflect oppression in their historical context of production. Government representatives in each story, such as the teacher in “Luvina,” the land reform official in “Nos han dado la tierra,” or narrative strategies that coincide with the government’s plan for internationalization, confront representatives of the Church, family structure and the land’s natural power. These entities dehumanize characters by reducing them to specific body parts, giving them grotesque features or wounds, connecting them to animals, highlighting their bodies to such an extent that they lose their higher functions, and feminizing male characters. By considering the connections between these characters’ bodies as an assemblage, we saw how they became metaphors for oppression, and, by negating the individual characters’ experiences, could also point towards resistance. Characters might become mad, appear to exist as a single body part, expel fluids, cry or create an alternate spiritual vision rooted in the land. In so doing, they confront the narrative strategies analogous to the consolidation of power in the Mexican government, particularly in the presidential office, limiting narratives for women and men, and the Church’s control of religious practice. As they lose their individual features, these characters’ bodies become places to meet and entities that illustrate the possibilities within the collective.

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3 Oppression, Supplementary Motherhood and

Indigenous Resistance in Rosario Castellanos’ Oficio

de tinieblas

As early morning mass ends on Maundy Thursday, Good Friday and Holy Saturday in

Catholic churches, a priest extinguishes candles until there is no more light in the church. This progressive darkness, called the Office of Tenebrae, is the basis for the title of Rosario

Castellanos’ increasingly sinister 1962 novel Oficio de tinieblas (D’Lugo 109; O’Connell 132).57

The novel represents an indigenous uprising in San Juan Chamula, Chiapas, Mexico, in which indigenous people rebel against upper-class ladinos in nearby Ciudad Real, present-day San

Cristóbal de las Casas.58 It is widely recognized that the novel conflates its representation of this

1867 to 1870 struggle, called the Cuscat Rebellion, with a representation of land reform carried out in Mexico from 1934 to 1940, under then-president Lázaro Cárdenas.59 In the novel, a priest,

57 We can also follow critic Joanna O’Connell and consider the novel itself to be an oficio, or calling (132). Indeed, as O’Connell observes, the text mentions Catalina’s weaving (11) and Mercedes’ task of finding women for Leonardo (20) as oficios; Catalina’s larger goal of resisting Catholicism and existing landholding patterns could also be the text’s oficio, as could Castellanos’ own life. 58 I employ the Spanish term ladino, which is also used in Oficio de tinieblas, to refer to members of upper-class society in Ciudad Real. According to the novel, ladino is “una condición que compartía[n] los ricos y los poderosos…En San Juan era un privilegio ambiguo que suscitaba entre los inferiores desconfianza, temor y agresividad” (116). O’Connell defines it this way: “Ladino is the language of the Sephardic Jews expelled from Spain in 1492; the word was used in a pejorative sense to mean a shifty or marginal character. In the modern regional context of southern Mexico and Central American where it is used today, Ladino is not synonymous with White, although European ancestry and culture – and whiteness by association – operate as privileged terms” (51). In the text, being ladino is associated with “whiteness,” the Spanish language and the upper social classes 59 Other analyses of the novel, such Françoise Perus’ “La trayectoria literaria,” Catherine Caufield’s A Hermeneutical Approach, or Gastón García Cantú’s “El vinculo,” highlight the text’s relationship to the 1870s indigenous uprising and land reform in the 1930s. According to anthropologist Christine Kovic, this was one of several indigenous rebellions against oppressive political, religious or social structures in Chiapas (70). In the nineteenth century, a woman called Agustina Gómez Checheb, and her husband Pedro Díaz Cuscat, developed a cult of talking stones (Kovic 72). This cult centered on the couple’s stone idol “son” and the pilgrimage spot of Tzajalhemel (Caufield 62; Kovic 72). In both fiction and history, the pilgrimage spot affected the ladino economy,

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Manuel Mandujano, arrives in San Juan Chamula at the same time as a woman, Catalina Díaz

Puiljá, re-invents traditional indigenous religious beliefs that centre on worshipping clay idols in an isolated cave. The conflict between indigenous and ladino people culminates in the text when the indigenous people ironically re-invent the ladino salvation narrative and perform a Passion

Play that climaxes as Catalina and a sacristan, Xaw Ramírez Paciencia, crucify Catalina’s adopted son, a character called Domingo, on Good Friday.

Oficio de tinieblas also highlights the relationship between landholding patterns, the

Catholic Church, land reform and the government in the novel’s context of production, the early

1960s. The text presents the government’s struggles with the traditional landownership system through conflicts between Leonardo Cifuentes, a landowner, and Fernando de Ulloa, a bureaucrat in charge of land reform. When Fernando’s wife, Julia de Acevedo, later becomes

Leonardo’s mistress, it is a double betrayal. The interactions between Fernando and indigenous people, who are to receive land, highlight the indigenous characters’ bodies. At the same time, landowners interpellate indigenous character as mobs and systematically repress women. The

Church fares no better; in the novel, its worship services highlight indigenous people’s alcoholism and its representatives criticize indigenous religious beliefs. In an effort to counteract these oppressive forces in the novel, the indigenous community unites around the character

Catalina and her religious movement. This new religion similarly interpellates indigenous characters as a collective entity, particularly by emphasizing their eyes. I also propose that

Catalina becomes the centre of a web of relationships that supplement a lack of love and

as indigenous people no longer sold products, bought goods, or paid fees to the church for alms or sacraments (Kovic 72). The historical conflict culminated when a white reformer, Ignacio Fernández Galindo, led an uprising, which culminated in 1867 when an indigenous boy, Domingo Gómez Checheb, was crucified (Caufield 62).

116 maternal care in the text. Then, as a final act of resistance, the indigenous characters and

Catalina’s metaphorical children take part in Domingo’s redemptive and disturbing crucifixion.

This chapter begins by situating the novel in its context of production, the 1950s and

1960s, and identifies the landownership system, the State and the Catholic Church as significant powers in this context. Foucault’s framework allows me to describe how power works at this historical moment and in the literary text, and how powerful characters act so as to subjugate less powerful ones. I turn to Aníbal Quijano and Michael Aronna to describe racial dynamics in the text and to Elizabeth Grosz, Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva to analyze the role of women. Castellanos’ essays and Juan José Arreola’s 1963 novel La feria also prove useful when describing relationships between men and women. As the novel emphasizes the effects of the landownership system on women and indigenous people, the chapter posits that the novel’s depiction of indigenous characters as mobs and its portrayal of female characters through their ability to sexually please men or have their children sheds light on the effects of the landownership system. The chapter then surveys interactions between bureaucrats, politicians, intellectual figures and indigenous characters and suggests that they reflect the Mexican State in this time period. I also propose that narrative shifts in the novel act analogously to the government’s movements between oppression and leniency in this time period, and thus further depict the repressive nature of the Mexican State. We see the Catholic Church’s power in this context through the novel’s depictions of indigenous participants in Catholic and syncretic religious ceremonies as alcoholic or child-like.

After examining the ways representatives of the landownership system, the State and the

Church subjugate characters’ bodies in Oficio, the chapter posits that the body is central to resistance in the text. Hence, the characters’ oppression, which we will see in their reduction to mobs or specific features and behaviours, is related to the possibility of resistance. The novel

117 presents repetitive imagery of sight in indigenous religious ceremonies and supplementary maternal bonds between women; I argue that these images create intertextual bonds between indigenous and female characters that can be thought of as a challenge the racial and gender dynamics in the novel. As this challenge occurs through indirect connections, different from the materiality of bodily experience Foucault outlines, I approach this resistance through a different theoretical lineage. Puar’s notion of the assemblage, which draws on Deleuze and Guattari, affect theory and phenomenology, is thus significant for the final sections of this chapter. While the landowners in the text ultimately act with power to reassert the existing system, the indigenous and female characters’ attempt to resist them underlines the connection between the collective body and social change in this novel.60

3.1 Powerful Entities in the Novel

This chapter builds on the established relationship between Oficio de tinieblas, the Cuscat

Rebellion and Cárdenas era land reform by proposing that the novel also relates to its context of production.61 Castellanos, in a 1969 essay titled “La corrupción intelectual,” sheds light on how power works in this context. She maintains that armed forces, trusts, parties and the Church are forces of destruction, oppression, privilege and dogma (202). In this vein, Williams argues that in

Mexico, bureaucrats, property owners and others, which he groups together as the police, have consistently suppressed campesinos “via institutionalization, negotiation, subornment, electoral fraud, intimidation, or amnesty” (162). Representatives of the landownership system, the State,

60 In this way, this chapter provides an avenue for reflecting on the connection between oppression, the collective body and social change in an indigenous context. Williams discusses the indigenous context in Mexico in several chapters. He argues that change might come about by developing a language of public use and public interest (191), rather than through a vision of the collective body and collective subject. 61 See for example Caufield, García Cantú or O’Connell.

118 and the Church in the novel, who work together and separately to suppress indigenous campesinos, can be thought of as Castellanos’ destructive or oppressive forces.62

The Church, the State and the landownership system are seen to be so destructive and repressive in the novel through interactions between their representatives and less powerful characters. That these interactions demonstrate relationships of power coincides with Foucault’s assertion that power exists only when it is put into action (“The Subject and Power” 219). The actions of Leonardo, a landowner, underline the power he holds in his context: he treats his wife,

Isabel, badly, he hires a personal madam, doña Mercedes, and he rapes an indigenous woman,

Marcela.

As a representative of the landownership system in Oficio, Leonardo confronts bureaucrats in charge of agrarian reform, who are representatives of the State. This confrontation reminds us that in the late 1950s, President Adolfo López Mateos’ administration (1958-1964) re-emphasized land reform. In the novel, unnamed actors in Mexico City send Fernando to exert

State power in rural areas and implement agrarian reform. Fernando the bureaucrat’s short tenure as a high school teacher and the well-educated priest Manuel’s shocked reaction to indigenous religious practice remind us that the government influenced Mexican intellectual circles in the

1950s and 1960s. Castellanos’ life and journalistic writing similarly reflect the government’s impact in this realm. This chapter also views shifts in narrative perspective and focus, from omniscience, to focussing on a particular character and then a return to omniscience, as analogous to State power in the 1950s and 1960s. In this time period, the Mexican government shifted from emphasizing on the institutions we examined in earlier chapters to opening spaces

62 Williams would call all three of these actors the State, because in his view, the State is comprised of both the government and the landholding system.

119 for dialogue outside of them. This led to strikes and more open elections, which I relate to the text’s focus on a particular character. The novel’s return to omniscience can be thought of in relation to the State’s repressive response to these strikes and elections, which it considered to be subversive activities.

The Catholic Church is also a force of repression, privilege and dogma. In Oficio, its hierarchy sends Manuel to act as the priest in San Juan Chamula even though Manuel would rather stay in Ciudad Real (112). In the novel, he also holds incredible power: the masses and other ceremonies he performs in San Juan Chamula emphasize indigenous characters’ heads or feet, which deny their existence as “whole” people, and liken them to dirt.

3.1.1 The Landownership System Oficio de tinieblas thus presents a landownership system in which ladino male landowners exert power over female and indigenous characters. According to Quijano, these relationships of power are rooted in Mexico’s colonial history. He maintains that colonizers extended Cartesian dualism to entire societies and races and argues that this division, which has been held since classical antiquity, continues in the present day (Quijano 555-6). In other words, ladino men are the “mind” and everyone else is the “body.” This division of subjectivity explains the novel’s representation of ladino men through their minds and indigenous people and women through their bodies.

Aronna’s analysis of essays from the early 20th century, such as the Uruguayan writer

José Enrique Rodó’s Ariel (1900) and the Bolivian commentator Alcides Arguedas’ Pueblo enfermo (1919), confirms this division of power between men and women. Within this literature’s historical and regional context, Aronna contends that the division of mind and body remains. That is, in these essays, he observes that men become detached from their sexuality and

120 concentrate their energy on abstract thought, while women “become” their biology and are thought to be consumed with the reproductive task (Aronna 123-4). Oficio also coincides with

Aronna’s assertion that in Latin American thought, non-white people are seen as “regressive, degenerative or sickly” (95-6). This scheme places power in the hands of white men, and situates non-whites and women in stagnant and regressive roles (Aronna 124). The hierarchy created through the colonialist landownership system means that few characters in Oficio become embodied subjects. Women and indigenous characters are reduced to mass bodies or to their individual biological functions; conversely, we learn little about the landowners’ physical features.

We can see this division in the way the novel describes a conversation between Fernando and Leonardo and the experience of group of indigenous women who travel between San Juan

Chamula and Ciudad Real. At one point in the novel, Fernando appears at Leonardo’s home.

Leonardo, after offering him what the novel tells us is customary rural hospitality, asks

Fernando, “¿En qué piensa usted, ingeniero?” and then “¿Tiene usted alguna queja?” (148). The dialogue’s emphasis on thought and an almost legal use of the word “queja” is accompanied by the narrator’s limited description of Leonardo pacing in front of Fernando and then lighting a cigar. While this does describe Leonardo’s movements, it does not focus extensively on them. In contrast, when the novel describes the group of indigenous women, we learn that “[l]a distancia entre San Juan Chamula y Ciudad Real (o Jobel en lengua de indios), es larga. Pero estas mujeres la vencían sin fatiga, sin conversaciones” (15). By focusing on their speechless and indefatigable walk, the novel emphasizes the indigenous women’s bodies.

Neither group of characters surpasses the division between mind and body to acknowledge what Grosz calls the “complexities of organic bodies” (8). These bodies would be

“constructed and in turn constructed by an interior, a psychical and a signifying view-point, a

121 consciousness or perspective” (8). Since the novel does not address the fact that the female characters’ bodies construct this perspective, just as it fails to acknowledge that the male characters’ point of view is constructed by their bodies, it represents and critiques the landholding system, which denies both sets of characters an embodied subjectivity that would link mind and body.

Racial language in the novel confirms this hierarchy: “[s]er patrón implicaba una raza, una lengua, una historia que los coletos poseían y que los indios no eran capaces de improvisar ni de adquirir” (149). An anonymous narrator, describing hopes for the future, inadvertently emphasizes indigenous subjugation:

El indio…ya no andará como ahora, siempre pegado a la pared, como buscando

protección en ella; no se deslizará lo mismo que un animal furtivo, temeroso de la

reprimenda, de la orden que jamás acierta a interpretar, de la pregunta para la que no tiene

más que respuestas inadecuadas y balbucientes. Ya no se detendrá ante el amo sin

atreverse a levantar los ojos. (150)

In other words, according to this narrator, in the text’s present, indigenous men walk close to city walls with downcast eyes, an act that makes them look like furtive animals unable to answer the questions directed towards them. Male landowners are thus connected to race, language and history, and indigenous characters to their eyes, animals and the inability to understand or create language. This juxtaposition sets the precedent for the denial of indigenous people’s embodied subjectivity.

These indigenous characters become, in Althusserian terms, a collectively oppressed subject through their subjection (Althusser 182). The text’s description of how a group of indigenous men travel from the campo to distant fincas in search of work illuminates this process. “Desde el momento en que se alejaron de sus parajes se operó en los indios una extraña

122 transformación. Dejaron de ser Antonio Pérez Bolom, tocador de arpa…” (51). Once they arrive in the finca’s office, each man is reduced to “una huella digital al pie de un contrato” (51). After they have become their fingerprints, the novel notes that “[l]o que andaba por los caminos era un hombre anónimo, solitario, que se había alquilado a otra voluntad” (51-2). A ladino procedure puts power into action. Its effects reduce these indigenous characters to their fingerprints as it removes a positive group identity. By renting out their ability to perform manual labour, then, these indigenous men become an assemblage whose loss of agency is intimately tied to the repression of their entire population group.

Prior to this journey, however, the indigenous characters had participated in their own subordination. A group of older men told Pedro, who was to lead the group:

- Haz lo que nosotros, tatik; no se puede estar lo mismo que los animales, sin amparo ni

redil. Busca la sombra del patrón; él te ayuda en tiempo de la necesidad.

Eso decían los viejos; pero callaban las humillaciones, las fatigas del peón acasillado, del

sujeto a baldío. (51)

The older men’s denial of their own repression highlights the ways that they became embedded in their own subjection. In this case, these indigenous characters conceive of themselves as better than animals even though they negate their own suffering and lose their individual identity in the process.

This landownership system is related to patriarchal familial structures, as both systems reduce groups to their biology, indigenous people and women respectively. Julia Kristeva, in her

1976 musings on virginity and motherhood, “Stabat Mater,” puts it in the following way: in

Western culture and history, there has been a “resorption of femininity into the Maternal,” that is, femininity is defined by a woman’s ability or choice to have children (Tales of Love 236).

Castellanos, predating Kristeva’s work by six years, describes the effects of this tendency in rural

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Mexico. According to a 1970 editorial, respectable women in rural areas had tended to marry close male relatives and became respectable señoras by having children every year and accepting that their husbands would be involved with other women (“Lázaro Cárdenas” 484). The novel, published eight years before Castellanos’ editorial, evokes a similar situation. The patrón and possessor of language and history was also a man who:

sostiene una casa en Ciudad Real, con la esposa legítima y los hijos, los muchos hijos; el

que instala una querida en el pueblo y otra en el rancho (aparte de las aventuras

ocasionales con muchachitas indias y pequeñas criadas mestizas; aparte, también, de las

incursiones en el barrio prohibido). (149-50)

This description reflects a particular social system that ignores women’s individual experiences, instead focusing on their place within categories of race and gender and their ability to sexually please men or their ability to bear them children. As critic Maureen Ahern has observed, in

Castellanos’ oeuvre, “women are objects of exchange that assure continuity and control in a social community” (34), an assurance they give precisely because of their ability to bear children, and the understanding that women are more adept at rearing children than men.

Juan José Arreola’s 1963 novel La feria, set in a Zapotlán el Grande, in the Mexican state of Jalisco, confirms the presence of the patriarchal double standard in Mexico in the 1960s. It introduces us to a character called Odilón:

Qué casarse ni qué ojo de hacha. Él tiene una novia formal en Guadalajara, y aquí y en

otros pueblos nomás anda buscando muchachas que le hagan el áijale. Dicen que se mete

con las criadas de su casa y hasta con las hijas de sus mozos. A todas les dice que va a

casarse con ellas. (117)

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Odilón leads on any number of innocent women while maintaining his respectable “formal girlfriend” in his hometown. He, and other men of his class, subjugate white, mestiza and indigenous women to uphold the landholding system in rural Mexico.

Returning to Oficio, we see that female characters’ silence and disrupted-interruptions to male discourse demonstrate that they could not escape this system, and, what Ahern maintains, its catastrophic effects (34). A discussion between the wealthy landowner Leonardo and his wife

Isabel is illuminating in this regard. As a respectable señora, Isabel is disgusted after she finds out that Leonardo has raped a young female character called Marcela, but she cannot complain.

In spite of her silent assent, “[n]o pudo evitar un gesto de asco” (22). The novel then expands on

Isabel’s responses to her role as she and Leonardo eat breakfast together:

Isabel había dejado escapar la oportunidad para exigir una reivindicación. Ahora tendría

que defenderse, comprobar que no había faltado a sus deberes de dueña de casa.

Acaloradamente improvisó una disculpa.

- No necesitabas de mí. Ahí está doña Mercedes.

Pronunció este nombre aborrecido con el infantil resentimiento de quien ve su lugar

usurpado por otro.

- No te importa si tengo o no quien te supla. Tu obligación como patrona…

- ¡Yo como patrona no estoy obligada a agasajar a tu querida! (68-9)

Cixous’ contentions in “The Laugh of the Medusa” shed light on this passage.63 According to

Cixous, “[e]very woman has known the torment of getting up to speak… her words fall almost always upon the deaf male ear, which hears in language only that which speaks the masculine”

63 For further criticism that relates Castellanos to feminist theory see for example Naomi Lindstrom’s “Rosario Castellanos: Representing Woman’s Voice” or Kristen F. Nigro’s “Rosario Castellanos’ Debunking of the Eternal Feminine.”

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(880-1). Using Cixous’ observations, we see that when Isabel is courageous enough to interrupt her husband as he tries to impose his vision of a respectable wife onto her, her words fall on deaf ears. Then, in response to his reminder of her obligation as his wife, she reminds him of doña

Mercedes, Leonardo’s personal madam. Isabel finally becomes so frustrated that she mentions the unmentionable, the only words which will speak to the masculine in this context: Leonardo’s mistress or “querida.” By no longer conforming to Leonardo’s wishes, she surpasses what

Cixous calls the torment of getting up to speak and asserts her mental faculties for the first time.

Nevertheless, after complaining, Isabel reinserts herself into a subordinate role, automatically wiping Leonardo’s cigarette ash off the kitchen table. “Con este gesto tan simple Isabel estaba ya, de un modo tácito, dispuesta a obedecer a su marido” (72). Her initial verbal interruption leads to this automatic gesture that restores her to a subjugated position within the patriarchal landownership system.

At the same time as the emphasis on women’s bodies subjugates them, in the novel, we see how female characters gain some measure of power, first by appealing to their bodies and then, by subjugating other women. For instance, Leonardo’s madam Mercedes and his “querida”

Julia, Fernando’s wife, exert power over him by recurring to their bodies. We learn that:

Doña Mercedes Solórzano mantenía cerrada su tienda desde algunos meses antes. El

verdadero motivo por el que Leonardo Cifuentes se la instaló en uno de los cuartos

exteriores de su propia casa… conseguirse bajo esa mampara transitorias mancebas entre

la servidumbre humilde y aun entre las indias, había dejado de tener vigencia. (64)

This woman’s original job is no longer useful because Leonardo has found a mistress. Still, since

Mercedes seeks to maintain the power that she had held within a system that subjugated her, “la alcahueta se afirmó con este cambio porque había sabido ser indispensable” (64). The text labels

Mercedes as an alcahueta for the second time, and this, coupled with her position at the outside

126 of Leonardo’s home and the ability to make herself indispensable, likely by turning to other work, alludes to the late medieval Spanish novel in dialogue, La Celestina. The characters

Celestina, was said to live on the edge of the city in a home that was falling apart (110), somewhat similar to Mercedes’ position at the edge of Leonardo’s home. The implication that

Mercedes turned to other ventures when she was no longer needed in her initial role reminds us of Celestina’s “seys officios…labrandera, perfumera, maestra de hazer afeytes y de hazer virgos, alcahueta y un poquito hechizera” (110). These parallels between Celestina and Mercedes establish that Mercedes, through her willing subordination to Leonardo, acts as a malevolent power in the text. Accordingly, Mercedes tells Julia to leave her husband: “[p]ara una mujer de su condición no es bueno eso de andar de aquí para allá como una guacha” (65). Julia had used her body to begin a relationship with Fernando, but then was at his whim, and had to move whenever he found a new job. The text then confirms that women only gain a very limited power as they yield to men: “Y la Alazana [Julia] hacía su lucha con probabilidades de ganar la partida.

Porque Leonardo estaba lo que se dice picado por ella” (65). Although Julia and Mercedes may gain power in the novel, their actions support the idea that the relationship between men and women in the text is a null set. Even if these women vindicate their subordinate position in some small way, it is often at another woman’s expense.

3.1.2 Land Reform in the Novel: “No por primera vez” The government had previously attempted to transform the landholding system, but not to challenge its racialized and gendered power dynamics. In the first two chapters of this dissertation, we saw how the State had hoped to use bureaucrats, teachers and other professionals to control rural Mexico. The Mexican government re-invigorated this attempt in 1958, shortly before the novel was published, as then-president López Mateos promised to re-invigorate the land redistribution program president Cárdenas had begun in 1934. According to historians

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Héctor Aguilar Camín and Lorenzo Meyer, López Mateos made these promises because he was afraid of campesino mobilization outside of the Consejo Nacional Campesino (CNC), the campesino body organized by the PRI (219). Indeed, campesinos did develop organizations such as the Unión General de Obreros y Campesinos de México and the Central Campesina

Independiente (Aguilar Camín and L. Meyer 219; Agustín Tragicomedia mexicana 1 195). For this reason, López Mateos distributed 3.2 million hectares of land to ejido groups in his six years in office. Still, this agrarian reform was often ineffective because, as we saw represented in

Rulfo’s “Nos han dado la tierra,” the program tended to distribute poor quality land. As a result, campesinos continued to migrate to Mexican cities, and, in the wake of migration to urban areas, large landholders rented abandoned ejido land, thus continuing to control rural Mexico (Agustín

Tragicomedia mexicana 1 172).

Arreola’s La feria points out the longstanding nature of the situation.64 One of Zapotlán’s residents tells us that progressive waves of colonization, from the Spanish Conquest to 19th century liberal Reform and 20th century agrarian reform laws, have subjugated indigenous people and eliminated their land rights, rather than redistributing land to them:

El Rey de España mandó dividir todo esto [Zapotlán] en cinco comunidades indígenas,

cada una con su tlayacanque, y los frailes lo convirtieron en Cofradías, cada una con su

santo y su capillita. Y a la hora que se vino la Reforma, en vez de que las capillas fueran

de las tierras, resultó que las tierras eran de las capillas, y por lo tanto, del clero. Fueron

puestos en venta, y ya sabe usted quiénes las compraron. Vaya, si no, a buscar los

64 La feria has a number of narrators. As Ximena Troncoso Araos asserts, “[e]n ciertos fragmentos el mismo personaje es el narrador de su historia (el zapatero, el miembro del Ateneo, el joven del diario de vida); en otros el discurso se presenta en estilo directo introducido por un narrador básico o por un narrador personal. Muchas veces las voces irrumpen sin introducción previa de narrador alguno. En ocasiones el personaje es aludido o es tema de conversación en diálogos de otros personajes” (129).

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nombres en los archivos. Desde entonces data el verdadero pleito. Y como los indios

tenían después de todo razón, al estar dale y dale, se ordenó el famoso reparto de 1902,

que fue el fraude más grande y vergonzoso que registra la historia de este pueblo. (34-5)

This citation demonstrates the fraud that has pervaded land reform in Mexico, from the colonial encounter, to 19th century reforms that sold Church land to wealthy men, and then to what La feria tells us is the most fraudulent experiment, early 20th century reform. Arreola’s text also points how indigenous people were finally afforded land rights in the 20th century because they were thought to have “reason,” in other words, that their raised hands, crying out for justice, were understood to be accompanied by an interior perspective. Oficio, however, emphasizes the land reform system’s failure by depriving its indigenous characters of an embodied subjectivity that would surpass a division between mind and body.

This longstanding struggle is brought to the latter part of the 20th century in the novel through Fernando de Ulloa, who was sent from Mexico City to redistribute land in Chiapas: “su misión de hacer vigentes las nuevas disposiciones agrarias, de dotar de tierras a las comunidades indígenas y rectificar los límites de las haciendas” (148). However, Fernando struggles to change the minds of the landowners. After all, as the novel reminds us, “Ulloa servía al gobierno, un gobierno que los propietarios, la gente de orden, miraba con desconfianza” (148). Through

Fernando’s interactions with wealthy landowners, we see that the landowners are in many cases, more powerful than the government in the rural Chiapas to which the novel alludes. At one point,

Leonardo tells Fernando:

Ustedes, con muy buena intención, qué duda cabe, están barajustando a los indios con las

prédicas de que todos somos iguales y tenemos los mismos derechos. Y no voy a pedirle

que usted comprenda y apruebe unas costumbres que no conoce; ni que crea usted, bajo

mi palabra, que el avispero de los indios más vale no menearlo porque si se alborota

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después no hay quien se lo aplaque. Lo que le voy a probar, es que el gobierno se está

metiendo en camisa de once varas. Y no por primera vez. (151)

Leonardo’s statement maintains that Fernando and the government he represents do not understand the system they are trying to change. Leonardo also reminds Fernando that the government has in fact already tried and failed to redistribute land in Mexico. Through this declaration, then, Leonardo reasserts his power over indigenous people by suggesting that they do not deserve their land, nor do they deserve to be the autonomous agents, the “gente de razón” to which Arreola’s novel alludes. Oficio thus also implies that the government will only be able to control rural Mexico through alliances with the landholding system.

Other representatives of the government, such as municipal and state leaders, have already made peace with this fact. Although Ciudad Real’s Presidente Municipal is the highest authority in the town, no one knows his name; only that he is old, fat and benevolent (271). The governor in Chiapas’ state capital, Tuxtla Gutiérrez, is similarly powerless. Although the governor ensures that he exerts power over his employees so that in his offices “no se escuchaba más que el tecleo de las ruidosas y antiquísimas máquinas de escribir” (244), he is reluctant to impose order outside of his office. For example, when a group of indigenous people seek a new title to their ejido property, the governor briefly considers and then denies their claim, ignoring federal law (245). While some parts of the federal and state governments may have wanted to impose their order throughout the country, in Oficio, they have largely accepted their subordinate position.

Indeed, in the text, the government reinforces the hierarchical interpretation of subjectivity. A group of indigenous men decide that Pedro, “hombre de razón,” will speak with

Fernando and other ladino authorities on their behalf. His people give him a “mind” because he can speak Spanish, which they hope will “echar a andar la máquina de la justicia, hasta hoy

130 paralizada por tinterillos y rábulas” (186). As Pedro tells Fernando about the other men’s situations, however, we learn that “[l]a desgracia de estos hombres tiene algo de impersonal, de inhumano; tan uniformemente se repite una vez y otra y otra” (186). Pedro’s speech reflects that indigenous characters are not considered individuals: as the “mind,” he repeats colonial patterns through his interactions with a dehumanizing government. As Pedro speaks to Fernando, we learn about Raquel Domínguez Ardilla, whose back bore lash marks that had not yet scarred and

Domingo Gómez Tuluc, who was captured in Jobel [Ciudad Real] to serve in a wealthy home

(186). While some of these characters are given names, in many cases, they are more metaphorical than markers of identity. One character, called Crisanto Pérez Condió, describes a time he was taken by force to work on a finca. This character’s name, Crisanto, combines Cristo and Santo, and alludes to Jesus Christ. His maternal surname, Condió, conflates the words con and Dios, with God. Together his names suggest that the landowners’ actions are sinful as well as criminal. Pedro’s interaction with the land reform officials, which on the one hand gives him a voice with which to confront power, also retells the stories of indigenous people so as to underscore their bodies, and reinforce the hierarchy of subjectivity. Thus, this interaction shows that when indigenous characters attempt to exert power within the landholding system, they underscore its racialized distribution of power.

3.1.3 Complicit and Conflicted Intellectuals The Mexican government, in addition to attempting to control rural areas, which the novel reflects through its bureaucrats and agrarian reform officials, exerted influence over intellectuals, which we see in Oficio through the characters Fernando and Manuel. In the 1950s and 1960s, the Mexican government employed intellectuals as civil servants, supported the newspapers they worked for and lauded them with awards and scholarships. In fact, Castellanos,

131 as a civil servant, journalist and award-winner, reflects each of these areas of influence.65 We see the way she was embedded in the intellectual system through her many achievements, including a scholarship to the Centro Mexicano de Escritores, directing the UNAM’s Information and

Press division and working for many years as a journalist (Domínguez Cuevas 96; Ocampo

333).66 She was named Woman of the Year by President Luis Echeverría in 1967, and followed bureaucrat-intellectuals such as Juan Rulfo when she worked for the Instituto Nacional

Indigenista and politician-intellectuals like Octavio Paz when she became the ambassador of

Mexico to Israel in 1974.67

At the same time, as Castellanos’ newspaper editorials and essays state, the intellectual is inefficient if he acquiesces to financial needs or if gives up and works for the government

(“Esplendor y miseria” 370-1; “La corrupción” 202). An essay, titled “La corrupción intelectual,” on the subject of science, specifically critiques those who work for the government.

For Castellanos, science “puede ser muy eficaz, y hasta creadora en ciertos aspectos limitados.

Pero no contribuye a satisfacer los desiderata de una ética humanista: el bienestar, la paz, el autogobierno, el progreso” (202).68 In one sense, she advocates for the intellectual who would

65 Mexican intellectuals and cultural institutions, such as the Casa del Lago, the UNAM and many newspapers, all received financial backing from the López Mateos government. For more information see Deborah Cohn’s article “The Mexican Intelligentsia, 1950-1968: Cosmopolitanism, National Identity, and the State.” 66 Castellanos was also a journalist and worked alongside important figures such as Carlos Monsiváis, Emmanuel Carballo and Carlos Fuentes at the newspaper Novedades’ supplement México en la cultura (Cohn 158-9). When the Novedades’ editor fired the México en la cultura’s editor Fernando Benítez, she and others joined him to found the magazine Siempre! and its supplement La cultura en México (Cohn 159). She also wrote for the newspaper Excelsior from 1963 to her death in 1974, a period of time that allowed her to collaborate with Vicente Leñero, whose novel El evangelio de Lucas Gavilán I examine in the next chapter. 67 For further information on Castellanos’ prominence in Mexico see Emily Hind’s Femmenism and the Mexican Woman Intellectual from Sor Juana to Poniatowska 52-5. 68 This “ética humanística” suggests that Castellanos and her ideas were heir to the Ateneo de la Juventud. This group of intellectuals in early 20th century Mexico strongly emphasized a humanistic ethos. It began in the final years of the Porfiriato under the tutelage of Justo Sierra, and was comprised of prominent figures such as José

132 stand outside this realm and thus reminds us of Revueltas’ stance as an intellectual outside of both government-sponsored and communist intellectual trends. Indeed, as critic O’Connell observes, Castellanos occupies an ambiguously non-hegemonic position (3). As such,

Castellanos’ position that the intellectual should not “give up” also coincides with a portion of

Theodor Adorno’s Minima Moralia. Adorno states that “[i]ntellectuals themselves are already so firmly established, in their isolated spheres… Their sole ambition consists of finding their way in the accepted canon, of saying the right thing” (“132. Expensive Reproduction”). Castellanos was critical of those whose entire career revolved around doing and saying the right thing.

At the same time, considering Castellanos’ almost life-long participation in the PRI’s system, we see that her life more closely corresponds to Edward Said’s idea of “alertness” than her essay “La corrupción intelectual” might have us believe. In Representations of the

Intellectual, which came out of a series lectures given to the BBC audience in 1993, Said maintains that intellectuals do not necessarily need to maintain a critical stance for the sake of being critical (23). Said does argue that they need to think “of the intellectual vocation as maintaining a state of constant alertness, of a perpetual willingness not to let half-truths or received ideals steer one along” (23). In other words, that it might be acceptable to embed oneself in intellectual structures, such as the BBC, so long as one retains a critical stance.

According to critic Emily Hind, Castellanos embedded herself in this system through her work and through her emphasis on personal decency and rational thought (57-59). Castellanos’ incorporation of indigenous people into her literary writing can also be seen in this vein.

Vasconcelos, Alfonso Reyes and Pedro Henríquez Ureña. For more information, see for example Sánchez Prado’s Naciones intelectuales 19-20.

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In attempting to incorporate indigenous people into national literature, Castellanos appealed to the Latin American indigenista tradition. Indigenismo, which was initially “a political and intellectual movement concerned with the integration of indigenous people,” had become a socially oriented realism by the early twentieth century (O’Connell 2; 65). Castellanos imbues this tradition with cosmopolitan aesthetics, such as fragmented narrative structure, multiple narrative voices and various stories within a single narrative in her 1957 novel Balún

Canán, 1960 short story collection Ciudad Real and Oficio de tinieblas. Each literary work exposes the tensions between the government, the landholding system and indigenous people in rural Chiapas.

Two intellectual characters in the novel, Manuel the priest and Fernando the land reformer-cum-teacher, parallel the tension between complicity with intellectual structures and a strong critique of the indigenous situation in Castellanos’ life and work. I propose that Manuel is an intellectual as well as religious figure because of his education. He was the best student in his

Seminary and believes this education is wasted on a small town where a priest “de misa y olla” would work just as well (112). Yet, he is embedded in the religious power system and so he obeys his bishop and goes to San Juan Chamula. Manuel fails most spectacularly when he travels to the place of worship of his “competition,” that is, when he goes to Tzajal-hemel to Catalina’s shrine and throws out her idols in front of a stunned audience (226-7). Manuel is in fact so angry about this religious alternative that he arranges a meeting with Church and government officials in the bishop’s palace, which leads them to send reports about subversive activities to state and federal governments. This eventually causes the military suppression of an indigenous uprising.

Like Castellanos’ complicit and critical relationship with Mexican intellectual circles, Manuel is part of the Catholic Church’s power structure, but then engages in a pointed critique of the same system as he arranges a meeting that includes government officials.

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The novel also discusses Fernando’s efforts in Ciudad Real’s Instituto Superior. In the

Mexican context, it makes sense that he would be a bureaucrat and teacher, because, as discussed in the first and second chapters, since the Revolution, the Mexican government has enacted education policies that occurred inside and outside of the school setting (Vaughan 31). Indeed, as

Vaughan observes, the government was interested in:

transforming a so-called feudal society into a secular, modern one by de-alcoholizing,

sanitizing, and defanaticizing Mexicans. Created in 1921, the Secretaría de Educación

Pública (SEP) set up federal rural schools to discipline and channel the energies of

rebellious peasants. The school would nationalize and modernize them. (Vaughan 4)

Then, shortly before the novel was published, the government became heavily involved in institutional education. Some two decades later, in 1943, when Ávila Camacho founded the

Instituto Nacional de la Investigación Científica, he also founded the Instituto Nacional de Bellas

Artes, which was to promote artistic development (Gortari 400; Pérez Tamayo 222-3). A decade later, in 1952, the UNAM, the Mexican National Autonomous University, was relocated to the southern part of Mexico City, and then-president Alemán ceremonially inaugurated its new installations (Pérez Tamayo 147).

In Oficio, Fernando’s hard work, new ideas, technological knowledge and urban provenance remind us of these new or re-invigorated institutions. When Leonardo calls him an

“engineer” (149), Fernando reminds us of the series of professionals, such as the engineers, hygiene workers and economists, who were to civilize rural Mexico (“Psicopedagogía e higiene”). Fernando, in the spirit of this civilizing mission, challenges the other teachers at the

Instituto, who are “fossilized” in their routines (158-9). In his case, members of the community persuade Ciudad Real’s priest, Father Balcázar, to encourage the Instituto’s director to fire

Fernando (159). Fernando is embedded in the government’s system, which pays his salary, but

135 critiques it, as he attempts to bring new ideas to the Instituto. Thus, Fernando and Manuel are unable to act independently of the governmental and religious systems in which they are embedded. Their failures parallel the challenges facing Mexican intellectuals, on one hand depending on State structures for economic advantage, on the other, criticizing its negative effects.

3.1.4 Narrative Strategies Reflect a State Repressing Chaos At the same time as the government attempted to reorganize rural Mexico and influence intellectuals through scholarships, awards and employment, it sought to appeal to urban

Mexicans by giving them space for dialogue and discussion. The PRI may have sought approval from urban Mexicans because they held the views Castellanos develops in a 1970 editorial:

el PRI es un partido al que no pretende nadie…por el que no vota nadie y por el que nadie

simpatiza. Y que, sin embargo… es el partido mayoritario y que cuando gana unas

elecciones su triunfo es legítimo y quienes lo ponen en entredicho están en el error.

(“Nuestros dogmas” 573)

By the 1950s, the PRI had relinquished some control over its affiliated institutions; however, when these organizations took advantage of lessened control, the PRI responded with repression.

In 1959, for instance, the PRI allowed an oppositional figure, Dr. Salvador Nava, to win elections in the state of San Luis Potosí. Still, the PRI ensured that its favourite candidate would win elections in the nearby state of Veracruz (Aguilar Camín and L. Meyer 218). Around the same time, in 1958, a PRI-affiliated union of railway workers decided to move in a new direction. Two sectional leaders, Demetrio Vallejo, an independent and militant unionist, and

Valentín Campo, a known communist, challenged the union’s leader (Aguilar Camín and L.

Meyer 220). The PRI and the central government could not deal with the strike Vallejo and

Campo provoked and used police and military action to repress the independent-minded union

136 leaders and their supporters (Aguilar Camín and L. Meyer 221). The government brought about change within the PRI and labour unions, but then could not tolerate it when its former vassals took advantage of these changes.

Oficio’s form, specifically its changes in narrative focus, relate to this historical context.

This furthers the link between form and historical context, in particular, to first-person plural and first person singular narrative voices and repression, advanced in the second chapter. The novel shifts from omniscience, to focussing on specific groups of characters or on individuals, to allowing characters to speak, and to abruptly reasserting an omniscient narration that mutes characters and negates their individual experiences. I read these shifts throughout the text as analogous to the government’s actions throughout the 1950s and early 1960s. López Mateos, the

PRI and affiliated organizations had been controlling, like an omniscient narrator controls an account, and then these political actors began opening up space for dialogue or free elections, which I consider to be similar to the novel’s focus on specific groups or individual characters and subsequent dialogue. I then propose that the abrupt reassertion of omniscient narration in Oficio is similar to the way government repressed Mexican people who took advantage of the openness they had promoted.

The novel’s first chapter provides an example of these shifts. It opens with an omniscient perspective, which, through my reading, acts similarly to a controlling government. “San Juan, el

Fiador, el que estuvo presente cuando aparecieron por primera vez los mundos; el que dio el sí de la afirmación para que echara a caminar el siglo” (9). The patron saint of Chamula thus becomes a God-like character that exerts a powerful gaze over his followers:

Sus ojos iban del mar donde se agita el pez a la montaña donde duerme la nieve. Pasaban

sobre la llanura en la que pelea, aleteando, el viento; sobre las playas de arena

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chisporroteadora; sobre los bosques hechos para que se ejercite la cautela del animal.

Sobre los valles. (9)

Unlike the Cyclopean God in Revueltas’ “Dios en la tierra,” San Juan is an all-seeing positive entity. He was there in the beginning, and was pleased with his creation. The text then shifts from this panoramic view to explore the relationship between Catalina and her husband Pedro, which I suggest is analogous to the government’s opening space for dialogue and elections throughout the 1950s:

Pedro González Winiktón separó las manos que la meditación había mantenido unidas y

las dejó caer a lo largo de su cuerpo. Era un indio de estatura aventajada, músculos

firmes… Su mujer, Catalina Díaz Puiljá, tejió un chamarro de lana negra, grueso, que le

cubría holgadamente hasta la rodilla. (11-12)

Slowly, Catalina emerges from her all-ecompassing shawl to explicitly participate in the text:

“[a]lrededor de la choza se había reunido un grupo de mujeres que aguardaban en silencio la aparición de Catalina. Una por una desfilaron ante ella, inclinándose para dar muestra de respeto” (14). Catalina emerges as a powerful entity in her community that can confront San

Juan’s omniscience; the other women collectively act in response to her power: “Se notaba en los gestos expectantes, rápidamente obedientes, ansiosamente solícitos, que aquellas mujeres la acataban como superior” (14). As the chapter progresses, it creates openings through which characters can act, just as in the historical context, Mexican people took advantage of opportunities to run in elections and begin strikes. These passages, moreover, clearly establish

Catalina as a locus of power in her community, even though as an indigenous woman she should be a doubly marginalized character: “Catalina admitía el acatamiento con la tranquila certidumbre de quien recibe lo que se le debe. La sumisión de los demás ni la incomodaba ni la envanecía” (14). Still, after the text recognizes Catalina’s power, it reduces its potential by

138 describing the dangers associated with being a woman in her position. We learn that “ella misma vigilaba su poder. Había visto ya demasiados manos izquierdas cercenadas por un machete vengador” (15). The way the novel juxtaposes its description of the omniscient San Juan, subsequently focuses on a powerful female and indigenous character, to finally describe her self- vigilance and protection from potential sources of retaliation, reminds us of the government’s strategies in the 1950s and 1960s. On the one hand, it offered Mexican people greater opportunities for political participation; on the other hand, it repressed strikers, such as Demetrio

Vallejo and Valentín Campo, or opposition parties that took advantage of this openness.

The novel continues this pattern of omniscience, dialogue and a return to omniscience, which I continue to connect to the historical context of repression, openness and return to repression. Oficio’s second chapter begins with a narrative voice that tells us what happened after the women arrived in Ciudad Real to sell their wares. Apparently, one of these women,

Marcela Gómez Oso, managed to escape from the group with furtive and rapid movements (17).

After Marcela, who was to sell clay jars, escapes this omniscience-repression, she meets doña

Mercedes and they dialogue in front of Leonardo’s house in tzotzil. Through this other language,

Mercedes may be trying to set Marcela at ease and entrap her. At the same time, I would argue that they create a space for themselves, outside of narrative omniscience, and analogously, to historical repression. After Marcela asks Mercedes how many jars she would like to buy,

Mercedes invites Marcela into Leonardo’s home, telling the younger woman, “Pasá. Te están esperando” (19). “Pero como Marcela no obedecía con la rapidez necesaria, la ladina [Mercedes] la empujó sin contemplaciones” (20). The narrative shifts from dialogue involving a marginalized character to focus on the more powerful Mercedes. This shift reinforces Marcela’s vulnerability within the race and gender dynamics in the novel and thus returns to the omniscience. In this fragment, the text moves from talking about a marginalized character to

139 allowing her to speak for a limited time, to her re-absorption into structures of power in the text.

This pattern of discussion about a powerless figure, to offering this figure space to speak, to the reassertion of power is similar to trends in Oficio’s context of production. Under López Mateos, the PRI moved from discussing powerless groups such as campesinos and workers as they related to institutions such as the CNC and CTM, to offering them space to speak or organize independently, in groups such as the Central Campesina Independiente (Aguilar Camín and L.

Meyer 219; Agustín Tragicomedia mexicana 1 195). However, when this speech became threatening, in the form of realistic contenders for elections, the Mexican government reasserted its power by controlling the entire electoral process.

3.1.5 The Subordinate Church The Catholic Church converges with the State and the landholding system. In the novel’s historical context, according to sociologist Víctor Gabriel Muro González, the Church dominated the religious sphere, and, because it enjoyed a close relationship with the State, it faced little opposition (547). In the 1950s, for instance, president Adolfo Ruiz Cortines (1952-1958) appropriated the Church’s moral compass to promote decency and to close bars and nightclubs

(Coral García 34). In the rural areas we see in the text, landowners and bureaucrats likewise enjoy a close relationship with priests and other clergy; they also subjugate indigenous characters. Oficio’s priests and sacristans construct indigenous characters as specific body parts or present them as alcoholic mobs. This is especially degrading when we consider that according to Aronna, the alcoholic was considered the enemy of the nation throughout Latin America from the 1920s onward (185).

Manuel’s reaction to the indigenous characters’ alcohol-imbued unorthodox religious ceremonies points to the repressive nature of the Church in the novel. When he arrives in San

Juan Chamula, he learns that its sacristan, Xaw Ramírez Paciencia, has been performing the

140 sacraments of baptism, marriage and last rites, in the absence of a priest (118). Manuel is likely so shocked because according to Catholic tradition, the sacristan is an assistant to the priest, but does not lead mass or other sacraments. The statues of saints in the church, in a further departure from orthodox Catholicism, are facedown, destroyed or covered in cloth (117). Manuel tolerates this behaviour until one night a loud noise interrupts his prayer.

En el interior de la nave se habían congregado los indios. No de rodillas, tendidos en el

suelo, resguardaban con la concavidad de las manos la llama agonizante de las velas y

gemían, retorciéndose. Había otros de pie, vacilantes ya beodos, que se enfrentaban a los

altares en una grosera relajación de agravios. Y la espuma de la gran ola de música, ese

tema infantil, se derrumbaba incesantemente después de sostener un momento su nada en

el espacio. (123)

Under Manuel’s gaze, the indigenous characters’ worship becomes a moaning, child-like mob that swayed back and forth. In response to their unconventional worship:

El padre Manuel no intentó siquiera gritar para pedir que cesara todo aquello. Su voz se

perdería dentro de la corriente de sonido más poderosa. Con paso rápido comenzó a

ascender las escaleras que conducían al coro. Allí, rodeado de principales, estaba Xaw

Ramírez Paciencia, ebrio también, tocando en el órgano un son Chamula.

– ¡Tú! – exclamó el padre Manuel. (123)

Manuel is surprised and betrayed by the one person he felt he could trust, Xaw, and so he interrupts the drunken Chamula musical celebration with a Spanish word. Manuel denigrates their worship by focusing on their alcoholism, moaning and swaying. In so doing, he emphasizes that the Church would prefer to lay down the law rather than understand its indigenous parishioners.

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This repeated link between indigenous characters, alcoholism and animals demonstrates the Church’s oppression in the context of the novel. After mass, “[c]onforme avanzaban las horas se veía aquella multitud moviéndose como un gran animal torpe, por su tamaño, por su pesantez”

(121). Drunk and shaking men support themselves on their equally drunk wives or their children.

Once they can no longer stand, the narrator tells us that there is only “[l]odo. Allí se revolcaban en pelitos, en lascivia, salpicando a su alrededor la sangre y la suciedad” (121). The text ties indigenous characters to each other, to animals and to the dirt, reinforcing the construction of the indigenous person as part of an indistinguishable alcoholic entity and emphasizes that the Church only saw the brutal nature of indigenous characters’ bodies. Indigenous characters are also reduced to indistinguishable characteristics through their syncretic religious ceremonies. For instance, at one point:

[t]odo el valle de Chamula retumbaba de música. El acordeón, jadeante y desigual, como

una respiración de borracho; las arpas, de líneas delicadas, invisibles por la distancia y la

oscuridad. El ritmo de los pies, calzados con caites de cuero grueso y mal curtido. (302)

Holy Week religious ceremonies continue to highlight indigenous characters’ bodies: in particular, to their feet, and obscure their voices with music. During mass, Xaw blesses other characters as they come to receive the sacrament. We learn that “[p]ara él no existía más que una sola cabeza – inclinada, sucesiva y anónima: la de su pueblo, sobre el que había recuperado la potestad” (312, emphasis mine). Xaw’s perspective presents indigenous characters as a single head inclined in a submissive position, which renders them indistinguishable from one another.

Thus, through syncretic religious ceremonies, Manuel and Xaw, representatives of the Church, emphasize a single body part, rather than a whole body, and the supposedly festive nature of indigenous people. Their impressions confirm that the Church was an integral part of what

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Quijano calls the hierarchical formation of subjectivity, in which indigenous people are affiliated with their bodies, in contrast to the ladinos, affiliated with their minds.

3.2 Framing Resistance in Oficio

In Oficio, then, representatives of the Church, the government and the landholding system wield power over indigenous and female characters. The government in Mexico City exerts power over the bureaucrats it sends to rural areas. Yet, these representatives are unable to dominate the central power in rural areas because of the entrenched status of ladino landowners.

Moreover, the novel’s male ladino characters, Fernando, Leonardo and Manuel, act as autonomous agents, and are tied to their reason, language and history, whereas the female ladina and indigenous characters, Julia, Isabel, Catalina and Mercedes as well as the unnamed masses are portrayed almost exclusively through their bodies. The indigenous characters’ purported alcoholism as well as the emphasis on female characters’ ability to sexually please men and have their children demonstrates the effects of power in the State, Church and landownership system.

At the same time, indigenous and female characters’ collective actions and interchangeable bodies are instrumental to the challenge to the powerful entities in the text and so in this section, I argue that the body is a central axis for resistance in Oficio. The novel employs intercorporeal images as it describes the revival of indigenous religion that depends entirely on Catalina’s body, and, to a lesser extent, the connection between her eyes and the bodies of her followers. I then propose that the novel vindicates the female body and maternity through a series of relationships that I call prosthetic maternal relationships which resist the patriarchal landownership system precisely on biological terms. I read these images in accordance with Weiss’ notion that intercorporeality “destabilize[s] the hegemony of any particular body image ideal” (100). In other words, even though the novel emphasizes

143 indigenous characters’ bodies and dehumanizes them, for instance, by likening them to dirt, in my reading, this dehumanization can serve a purpose. Not only does it point to oppression, but also to the possibility for challenging existing powers. As such, I am informed by Puar’s understanding of the assemblage, which, in her view, is a site of transformation, radical self- questioning and openness to something “other than what we might have hoped for” (“Prognosis

Time” 169). Thus, the same debilitating images that signal indigenous and female characters’ subjugation to narratives of power, connect them to one another and, in the text, challenge narratives of power.

3.2.1 Indigenous Religious Practice

Catalina’s body is central to the indigenous religious movement she develops, and this religious movement proves vital to challenging narratives of power in the text. Her body, for instance, dominates her ability to commune with the supernatural. “El don era una sonrisa aprobatoria, una mirada cómplice, un consejo oportuno, una oportuna llamada de atención. Y conservaba siempre en su mano izquierda la amenaza, la posibilidad de hacer daño” (15). The religious tradition she develops is similarly embodied. Catalina had heard a prophecy from stones as a child and reacts to the prophecy as an adult with blindness and immobility and the feeling that something is gnawing at her insides (192, 195). As Catalina’s religious practice grows in the cave in Tzajal-hemel, her experiences become more dramatically corporeal. A voice speaks to her audience and to her: “Vedla por el monte, caminar como una sonámbula. Es que está escuchando” (195). Hearing voices is a significant challenge to narratives of religious power: it forms part of the text’s challenge to the Virgin Mary. As Carol Clark D’Lugo has observed, Catalina, a barren woman, convinces herself that Marcela’s son Domingo is her son, in an experience not unlike the Virgin birth (108). While the experience of being barren and

144 subsequently giving birth is more similar to Elizabeth, mother of John the Baptist, than Mary. In either case, the novel critiques the Catholic Church. The text’s emphasis on listening, moreover, alludes to the early Christian belief of conceptio per aurem. This belief explains the Immaculate

Conception as the Holy Spirit speaking Jesus into being in Mary’s womb via Mary’s ear. In other words, the Word was spoken into Mary’s flesh so that she could bear the Word become Flesh

(Steinberg “How Shall This Be” 26-31). This belief came to Mexico through the priests that transcribed the Popol Vuh. This document records that a child of gods, through whom the light shines, was born after a bone’s saliva entered a maiden’s ear (Popol Vuh 115-7).69 This embodied religious practice also challenges governmental power in the text. In her cave,

Catalina: “[s]olía quedarse allí, en la oscuridad, respirando ese aire malsano que poblaba de delirios sus sentidos” (248). She makes grotesque idols in a feverish state (249), and for this reason critics, such as D’Lugo and O’Connell, maintain that she is a God-like figure in the text

(D’Lugo 108, O’Connell 132). Catalina, unlike the God who rested on the seventh day of creation, however, becomes frenzied, enters a trance-like state and convulses. In this frenzy, she becomes so powerful that she is arrested. The text associates Catalina with her physical features and actions. This challenges the hierarchy of mind and body and provides her with the opportunity for resisting religious and governmental power.

Catalina’s indigenous followers mimic her body and together, their bodies become the source of their resistance. In so doing, they vindicate their previous reduction to their bodies and characterization as a moaning, alcoholic mob, and, in my reading, become a version of Puar’s assemblage, that is able to transform its situation precisely because it has been annihilated. The followers’ bodies, particularly their eyes, mimic Catalina’s. Catalina gazes obstinately at her clay

69 It is also likely that the conceptio per aurem influenced the Early Modern priests’ transcription of the Popol Vuh.

145 idols and her eyes display the “[m]irada fija de los locos, esa mirada que no discierne, que no rescata del anonimato” (211, 214). Indeed, the ashes and smoke in her cave “quiebra[n] los sentidos de la sacerdotisa” (250). Her eyes display madness, because her senses, including sight, do not work in the traditional way. As her followers worship, they connect with Catalina through their eyes: “[l]os ojos de todos convergían naturalmente en Catalina” (211). When Manuel comes to the cave to confront Catalina, she turned “los ojos hacia sus seguidores como para demandar auxilio pero halló en ellos un reproche más vivo que ella pudiera dirigir” (226). The worshippers’ eyes communicate with Catalina and demonstrate their anger towards Manuel.

Their embodied challenge to narratives of religious power increases as the pilgrims unite around an unspecified body, “el cuerpo, el propio cuerpo que se desploma como un fruto exprimido”

(250). By celebrating a body that is not Christ’s, they explicitly challenge the Catholic Church and the centrality of the Eucharist in its rituals. In the text, Catalina’s religious movement begins with her body just as the repressive system made itself felt by reducing indigenous characters to their alcoholism, poverty or dancing feet. I thus argue that Catalina’s religious movement vindicates this earlier reduction by imbuing the repressed collective body with resistant potential.

Perhaps we could read this scenario alongside Williams’ analysis of Pedro Páramo, in which he observes that Pedro Páramo, the cacique in Comala could only assert his power by destroying the town (22-3). Following Williams, as well as Puar’s vision of the assemblage, I posit that as the characters’ bodies exist in tension between oppression and resistance, they are annihilated in order to destabilize the hegemonic Church and landownership system.

3.2.2 Supplementary Maternal Relationships

I then read a series of prosthetic maternal relationships that relate Catalina to Julia,

Idolina, Marcela and Domingo and propose that these relationships, based on the female body,

146 can be thought of as “using” the end result of the patriarchal landholding system for an alternate purpose.70 Much like Catalina’s religious experiences, these maternal connections vindicate women’s bodies; they prove that while a connection to female biology can disempower women in this context, it can also empower them. This section posits that the infertile Catalina figuratively adopts Julia, Idolina, Marcela and Domingo, given that Isabel is presented as an unloving mother to Idolina, that Marcela’s mother disowns her after she is raped, and that

Marcela subsequently ignores her child, Domingo. At the same time, Julia and Idolina’s nanny,

Teresa, act as supplemental mothers for Idolina. In my reading, Catalina’s body acts as what

Puar calls a Place to Meet and facilitates transformation based precisely because of the way these maternal relationships annihilate individual characteristics and reduce female characters to their bodies. The web of relationships also challenges the tendency for Latin American cultural thought to view the mother as possessing insufficient mental and spiritual abilities (Aronna 160), even as Latin American culture reveres the mother for her childbearing abilities.

My analysis of these relationships is shaped by Cixous’ “The Laugh of the Medusa,”

Kristeva’s Tales of Love and Irigaray’s This Sex Which is Not One, which assert the multiplicity of the female sex, maintain that women are inherently connected to one another and celebrate the woman as mother. Cixous maintains that female sexuality exhibits an “infinite and mobile complexity,” as it is the product of a body formed of a “thousand and one thresholds of ardor”

(885). Irigaray expands on Cixous’ mention of female multiplicity by maintaining that “[h]er sexuality, always at least double, goes even further: it is plural” (Irigaray This Sex 28, emphasis in text). She adds that:

70 We see similar models of motherhood in the contemporary Spanish novel. See for example Dulce Chacón’s La voz dormida, and Ofelia Ferrán’s analysis of this novel in Working Through Memory

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woman has sex organs more or less everywhere. She finds pleasure almost anywhere.

Even if we refrain from invoking the hystericization of her entire body, the geography of

her pleasure is far more diversified, more multiple in its differences, more complex, more

subtle, than is commonly imagined – in an imaginary rather too narrowly focused on

sameness. (28, emphasis in text)

Kristeva relates this notion of multiplicity to connections between women. For Kristeva, there exist among women “connections between atoms, molecules, wisps of words, droplets of sentences” (Tales of Love 257). These connections are amplified through the shared experience of maternity: “Women doubtless reproduce among themselves the strange gamut of forgotten body relationships with their mothers” (Tales of Love 257). Cixous, Kristeva and Irigaray’s emphases on multiplicity, fluidity and maternity serve as a model for the constellation of relationships we see in Oficio. These maternal relationships centre on a single character’s body to tangibly critique existing familial relationships. This connection between a represented body and critique reminds us of Mitchell and Snyder’s assertions regarding disability as prosthesis.

They argue that disability pervades literature as a stock feature of characterization, an opportunistic metaphorical device and a tangible body for textual abstractions (47-8). The maternal relationships in Oficio evoke prostheses and, due to their unusual nature and dependence on characters’ bodies, remind us of the ways disability can act as a prosthetic metaphor in fiction. I suggest that since these relationships in the text work outside of patriarchal structures, they serve as a metaphor that critiques existing familial relationships.

Catalina connects these characters to one another. As the text highlights Catalina’s inability to have children in its opening paragraphs, I suggest that it subtly foreshadows these unusual relationships:

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Catalina Díaz Puiljá, apenas de veinte años pero ya reseca y agostada... La falta de

descendencia fue vista como un hecho natural. Pero después, cuando las compañeras …

empezaron a asentar el pie más pesadamente sobre la tierra (porque pisaban por ellas y

por el que había de venir), cuando sus ojos se apaciguaron y su vientre se henchió como

una troje repleta, entonces Catalina palpó sus caderas baldías, maldijo la ligereza de su

paso. Y desde entonces ya no pudo sosegar. (12)

The novel emphasizes Catalina’s jealousy, inadequacy and longing for children; this implies that she might be so desperate that she would be willing to incorporate other children into her life.

The first child I read in the novel is Julia, and propose that Julia supplements Catalina’s childlessness and Catalina supplements Julia’s sense of fatherlessness. Although Julia had a father, he was a “gachupín desaprensivo y ordinario” and an alcoholic, and she did not love him

(126; 95). The novel addresses Julia’s lost father as she looks at herself in the mirror. It tells us of several fathers, first, the daily god who fills the home skies with lightning and gives you his name (285). Then, the gradual distancing from this father until one day,

te sentó en sus rodillas y acarició tu larga trenza de adolescente. Entonces te atreviste a

mirarlo en los ojos y sorprendiste un brillo de hambre o un velo de turbación, que te lo

hizo próximo y temible y deseable. (286)

She then looks at herself in the mirror and states that she is peering into the abyss. She is reluctant to discuss it, because “[h]ablar es como abrir un absceso. Corre el pus; la inflamación disminuye; la fiebre y sus desvaríos se mitigan” (288). In this way, the novel alludes to a key stage in child and subject development, and implies that Julia has been psychologically stunted

149 through the insinuated incest and sexual abuse.71 I would suggest that perhas, to complete her development, Julia might seek a new father figure.72 Julia also has no mother: although her mother had tried to give Julia a profession, Julia rebelled and ended their relationship as she became friends with a group of older, political, students and finally abandoned her mother to live with Fernando (127). I read Catalina’s longing for a child, although explained elsewhere in the novel, as a supplement to Julia’s lack of parental figures. In my view, as Catalina becomes

Julia’s father-mother, Julia becomes Catalina’s first figurative child.

The relationship between Catalina and Idolina is also created by textual similarities, the first of several alternative maternal figures that supplement Idolina’s distance from her mother

Isabel. I read an initial connection between Idolina and Catalina through idols and prophetic tendencies. Idolina’s name, Idolina, reminds us of the idols in Catalina’s cave. Idolina also evokes Catalina’s prophetic tendencies as she fulfills her grandparents’ prophecy: “Idolina, pronosticaron sus abuelos, será igual a Isidoro [su papá]. Pronto dio señales de que la profecía iba a resultar verdadera” (57). I suggest that Idolina’s connection to Catalina is confirmed through Idolina’s trance-like responses to changes in her routine. At Idolina’s first birthday party, for instance, “la excitación al contemplar en torno suyo tantos rostros extraños, de recibir tantos objetos nuevos fue tal que la acometió a una altísima fiebre y estuvo toda la noche delirando” (76). Her fever and delirium continue to occur whenever she confronts an extraordinary situation (76). Then, Idolina “[e]nflaqueció hasta parecer esquelética. Y cada vez

71 In regards to the same portion of the novel, O’Connell maintains that these father-daughter relationships represent how women participate in the patriarchal system (154). 72 In a Lacanian framework, the mirror stage marks a child’s awareness of his own body. It marks the beginning of a process of developing a body image in relation to her reflection in the mirror and the adult who carries her. This stage is so crucial because it is the moment at which the child comes into a false idea of his wholeness. In other words, in the mirror the baby appears to be a unified subject even though she lacks mastery over her limbs. Yet, because of this false impression, the baby will strive for the rest of his life to feel as whole as he appeared at that moment. For further information on the mirror stage, see the first chapter of Jacques Lacan’s Écrits: A Selection.

150 que se contemplaba en el espejo de su armario, sus ojos vidriaban de una maligna alegría” (77).

As with Julia, the mirror points out that Idolina had stagnated in an early stage of development.

Idolina the figurative infant might be seeking a supplemental mother, and, with her eyes, might gaze at Catalina, whose religious followers also expressed their devotion through their eyes.

Thus, Catalina, already intertextually connected to Idolina through Idolina’s name, her grandparents’ prophecies and her trances, is an excellent candidate for prosthetic motherhood.

Idolina also forms a maternal connection with her nanny Teresa. After Idolina was born, her mother, Isabel, did not have enough milk for her daughter, and so she forced an indigenous woman, Teresa Entzin López, to be her wet-nurse, even though this prosthetic maternity made

Teresa’s child die (140). Teresa shelters Idolina from Isabel from this moment onwards. Isabel fails to hide her resentment towards her daughter: “se hubiera transparentado el despecho que su madre disimulaba para no dar a la hija ocasión de burlas” (88). Teresa also shelters Idolina from insults and stares. They develop their relationship in Idolina’s bedroom, which is a maternal, enveloping atmosphere that reminds us of Catalina’s cave. In this space, Idolina, conforming to racial dynamics in the text, is more powerful than her mother figure, Teresa. As O’Connell reminds us, Idolina forces Teresa to speak or be quiet at her command (79-81; O’Connell 170-1).

Idolina is so powerful, in fact, that she commands doctors to come and see her from as far away as Guatemala and Mexico City (82). Like Mariana in Revueltas’ story “El hijo tonto,” Idolina finds the doctors and their medical gaze intimidating. They ask her so many questions that

“Idolina exageraba, con quejas y gemidos, la expresión de sus dolores” (83). Her body responds to the medical penetration of her maternal atmosphere. While critic Nuala Finnegan proposes that Idolina’s unusual physical behaviour and these medical incursions point to Idolina’s oppression and her incomplete rupture with the medical and patriarchal system (82), as Teresa protects Idolina from these outside incursions, it forms the basis for an alternative relationship,

151 admittedly an imperfect one, based on Kristeva’s molecules, wisps and droplets. Thus, rather than representing Idolina’s oppression, her connection to Teresa allows me to propose that both characters form part of a collective that could confront patriarchal narratives.

Idolina’s final prosthetic maternal relationship or intertextual connection is with her stepfather’s mistress, Julia. Idolina meets Julia as she is hiding in a corner of the party Leonardo and Isabel have thrown in Julia’s honour. Idola tells Julia that her family and medical professionals think she is sick, because she cannot walk (93-4). When Julia realizes that Idolina is paralyzed by the fear that she played a role in her father’s death, she speaks to Idolina on her own terms, which cures Idolina’s trances and paralysis (135-7). Thus, Julia steps in where Isabel,

Teresa and a series of doctors had failed. Emily Hind reads this relationship as a queer one, given that Julia examines Idolina in the light, and that Julia traces Idolina’s face with her fingertip

(Hind 83). Still, given Julia’s preoccupation for Idolina, I maintain that this relationship has maternal overtones. Catalina’s textual connection with Julia and Idolina, and the connections between Idolina, Julia and Teresa, challenge conventional maternal relationships and vindicate female multiplicity. Whereas elsewhere in the text, we saw how female characters used their bodies and biological functions to gain limited power within a system that subjugated them, here that the emphasis on Catalina’s embodiment leads to the formation of a new kind of relationship.

Marcela and her son Domingo complete this web of relationships; although O’Connell has recognized Domingo as Catalina’s son (165), in my reading, both characters act as Catalina’s figurative children. After Leonardo raped Marcela, Marcela’s mother Felipa disowned her.

Catalina desperately wants the “treasure of pregnancy,” so she invites the pregnant Marcela to live with her (46). Catalina has an ulterior motive for this generosity: she believes Marcela will be a suitable wife for her cognitively disabled brother, Lorenzo, and, thus, in a way, Marcela’s child could become hers (47). Indeed, Marcela feels distant from the ladino penetration of her

152 body. “Empezó a sentirlo: eso se movía, golpeaba, asfixiaba. Un espasmo de asco, último gesto de defensa, la curvó” (46, emphasis in text). Leonardo’s child fills her with anxiety, disgust, and the desire to take out what was growing inside her and destroy it (46). This continues until

Marcela gives birth: “Su cuerpo había entrado, repentinamente, en una zona en que la pujanza de la juventud vivificaba hasta su última célula, desnudándola por el dolor, haciéndola infinitamente sensible para el desgarramiento” (48). Marcela gives birth during an eclipse, and, because the

Gran Pukuj was said to wander the earth at such times, Catalina made a mask to defend Marcela from its evil power (48). Wearing a mask as she gives birth to a son she does not want distances

Marcela from herself and from her son. After the child is born Marcela completely rejects her son by refusing to breastfeed him (188). This refusal creates a connection between Catalina and

Marcela’s son, Domingo. Catalina calls the newborn Domingo Díaz Puiljá, after her and

Lorenzo’s father and “lo amadrinó” (49).73 Even though Catalina loves Domingo, he was:

[e]l bastardo de un caxlán de Jobel; la deshonra de una muchacha de su raza; la vergüenza

oculta de Lorenzo; el reproche de su marido, su propia llaga. Sí, la llaga que no cesa de

sangrar, que no cicatriza nunca porque Domingo está presente siempre. (319)

Like Tanilo in Rulfo’s “Talpa,” Domingo is a wound that will not heal. His open body completes the circle of relationships that centre on Catalina. Idolina, Julia, Teresa and Domingo become interchangeable figures; at the same time, their interchangeability vindicates women’s multiplicity, the connection between women and motherhood, and in this way, subverts hierarchical relationships between men and women we see elsewhere in the novel.

73 The novel does not call this character Domingo Díaz Gómez, which would follow Spanish naming conventions and suggest he is the son of Lorenzo Díaz Puiljá and Marcela Gómez, or Domingo Cifuentes Gómez, which would reflect his biological parentage.

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3.2.3 Domingo’s Crucifixion Catalina then uses Domingo’s body to unite Catalina’s other children and her followers.

Thus, in my reading, Domingo’s body also acts as a place to meet that violently annihilates other characters’ individuality as it celebrates indigenous religious beliefs and confronts the Church, landholding system and government. This confrontation builds on the religious experiences in

Catalina’s cave and the supplemental maternal relationships, and, like them, transforms the indigenous characters’ reduction to their dancing, music and alcohol-infused celebrations and women’s reduction to maternity and to their bodies.74

Domingo becomes San Juan Chamula’s Christ in a Passion Play that recreates Jesus’ crucifixion on Good Friday. This allows Domingo to become a metaphorical place to meet, where other characters can lose themselves and transform their situation. Catalina tells her religious followers that they will re-create the passion narrative to challenge the ladinos on their own terms. “Desafiémosle [al ladino] y vamos a ver cómo huye y se esconde. Pero si se resiste nos trabaremos en la lucha. Somos iguales ahora que nuestro Cristo [Domingo] hace contrapeso a su Cristo” (324-5). In the eyes of the community, their Christ will save them from ladino oppression. Domingo the child of a surrogate parent becomes a surrogate Christ. On Good

Friday, Xaw and Catalina extend Domingo’s body over the cross (320). Domingo, who initially does not realize what is going on, is like a stone or a vegetable. Domingo wakes up from this state and:

comprendió, de pronto, que de alguna manera se había convertido en eso que tanto temió

siempre: en un perro rabioso. Y quiso ayudar a los demás en su obra de exterminio y se

74 We see a precedent for a positive interpretation of violence in the novel’s historical context and in Puar’s understanding of the assemblage. Oficio de Tinieblas evokes an actual crucifixion from the Cuscat rebellion in the 19th century and today, in the church in San Juan Chamula, one can see a cross that, if not the actual cross, alludes to this rebellion. Moreover, in “Coda: The Cost of Getting Better,” Puar develops her reading of the assemblage on the basis of the epidemic of suicide among young gay men.

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retorció tratando de romper las ataduras y gritó para excitar a sus verdugos y la herida

volvió a sangrar, pero esta vez sin que la sangre perdida le trajera alivio ni debilitamiento.

(323)

His blood reminds us of female menstruation, and thus reinforces the earlier vindication of the female characters’ bodies. His:

primer borbotón de sangre (del costado, como en todas las crucifixiones) ciega a Catalina.

Y sin embargo intenta apartar la catarata que le nubla la vista y limpiar el rostro de la

agonía, como con el paño de Verónica, para dejarlo limpio y evidente… Es posible

escapar, con la sangre. (321-2)

Domingo’s blood binds him to his surrogate mother and reminds us of the blinding experiences in Catalina’s cave. Following Vieira’s argument that blindness subverts subjectivity, and is instrumental in transforming situations (3-4), Domingo’s act transforms the Passion Play.

Domingo’s blood makes his body an open sore, and this blood opens him to destruction and redemption. He screams so loudly that the entire valley can hear him and then he dies. As an open sore, he becomes the centre of an intercorporeal entity that exist in tension with the indigenous characters’ previous reduction to their bodies to challenge the Church and landholding system that oppressed them.

This challenge to established landholding patterns and the Catholic Church then returns to Catalina, the initial focal point for the resistant religious movement and alternative family structure. Voices speak to her. “No tiembles tú, mujer, por tu mujer ni por tu hijo. Va al sitio donde se miden los hombres…Porque está dicho que ninguno de nosotros morirá” (325). These voices evoke Matthew 28:5-8, where an angel at Jesus’ tomb tells a group of women looking for his body that he is not dead. The novel subverts the biblical angel’s subsequent invocation, that the women would receive eternal life, as Oficio predicts violence: “Y ha de volver arrastrando

155 por los cabellos a la victoria. Intacto, aunque haya recibido muchas heridas. Resucitado, después del término necesario” (325). The resistance, like Catalina’s religion and alternative family structure, is explicitly related to her body.

Catalina leads characters from the valley to San Juan Chamula. The characters move as a mass and realize that they will probably die:

se refugiarían de la lluvia bajo la copa de los árboles o en un redil de carneros; caerían

sobre los parajes, hambrientos, ciegos de cólera, buscando, casi a tientas, el fin de su

cansancio. Si irían después, dejando tras de sí alguna ruina humeante, un campo

devastado, un despojo de animal o de hombre. (344)

The text emphasizes their hunger and blindness and implies that the entire group is undergoing the same experience. The characters’ meeting under the trees leads them to have a collectively transformative experience that exists alongside their annihilation through hunger and anger. In this scenario, the characters collectively unleash violence and destruction. They loot finqueros’ houses; at one, they see an old dog; another, a paralyzed woman; elsewhere, some children; still another, a serene old man (327-9). They kill all the people they meet without order, regularity or meaning (327-8). Indigenous characters violently reverse social structures; their intercorporeal connections, created by political, religious and social structures of power, now relate to a violent resistance that ultimately does not provide a tenable alternative to the landholding system, its connection to the Church and ongoing tension with the government. After the indigenous people kill helpless ladinos, the military attacks them and life goes back to “normal.” The unusual parental relationships, like Catalina’s religious practice, are largely sidelined: the cave in Tzajal- hemel now centres on worshipping the Ordenanzas militares (364). The government and landholding system have thus absorbed the indigenous resistance.

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In the 1950s and 1960s, the Mexican government re-invigorated land reform and attempted to reassert power over the landholding system. It also attempted to offer greater independence to its allied organizations; however, as Mexican people took advantage of this openness to challenge the government, the government changed its mind and repressed them. The novel evokes this time period in a number of ways. It represents a landholding system that dictated relationships between ladinos and indigenous people and between men and women. In accordance with a colonial or hierarchical distribution of subjectivity, in the novel, female and indigenous characters are characterized through their bodies, and ladino men, through their minds. The government attempted to change this system, through agrarian reform programs, which we see in the text through the character Fernando de Ulloa. Fernando and Manuel Mandujano’s complicit and critical relationships with the Church and the Instituto Superior remind us of the Mexican government’s interest in the intellectual realm in the 1950s and 1960s. The chapter also demonstrated how narrative strategies mirrored the government that changed its mind. In Oficio, the Church, and its representatives, Manuel and Xaw Ramírez Paciencia and the ritual of mass, act in accordance with landholding system to reduce indigenous characters to a single physical feature or alcoholism. At the same time, I propose that these characters’ bodies are the basis for resisting these same oppressive structures. The indigenous characters that participate in

Catalina’s religious rituals in the cave in Tzajal-hemel form a collective subject that challenges

Catholic religious narratives. In the same way, the text vindicates the reduction of women to their biological functions through supplemental or prosthetic maternal relationships between

Catalina, Julia, Idolina, Teresa, Julia Marcela and Domingo. These figurative children evoke one another and the characters that participate in Catalina’s religious movement to enrich Domingo’s bloody crucifixion. The collective body formed by these relationships provokes mass violence.

Although they ultimately fail within the text, they are an avenue for imagining what a religious

157 or political resistance movement might be like. El evangelio de Lucas Gavilán, a text that imagines such a movement, is the subject of my next chapter.

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4 Leñero, Liberation Theology and Luke’s Gospel in Mexico: El evangelio de Lucas Gavilán Vicente Leñero’s novel El evangelio de Lucas Gavilán adapts the Gospel of Luke to mid

1970s Mexico.75 Lucas Gavilán, its implied author, re-imagines Jesus’ birth, ministry, death and resurrection through the life and work of a man called Jesucristo Gómez. Gavilán’s Gospel opens with a prologue, modelled after the Gospel of Luke, which addresses his intended reader,

Teófilo; the prologue tells us that, like the biblical Gospel, it will present a historical account.76

As the novel reinterprets Jesus’ life from birth to crucifixion, it transposes events from 1st century Canaan to 20th century Mexico. Although the Gospel of Luke is a religious text, Leñero’s is a secular reading that remains grounded in the Mexican context, which is imbued with religious imagery and symbols. The novel unmistakeably takes liberation theology’s preferential option for the poor as the prologue states that it seeks to recreate Jesus’ life based on Latin

American liberation theologians such as Jon Sobrino, Leonardo Boff and Gustavo Gutiérrez. In accordance with liberation theology, the novel emphasizes Jesus and other biblical characters as an example.77 It advocates liberation theology’s position that salvation can be achieved on earth by combating present-day injustice. Gavilán thus tells Teófilo that he paraphrases the Gospel of

Luke “con el máximo rigor, una traducción de cada enseñanza, de cada milagro y de cada pasaje al ambiente contemporáneo del México de hoy desde una óptica racional y con un propósito

75 All parenthetical citations in the text come from Vicente Leñero El evangelio de Lucas Gavilán (Mexico City: Joaquín Mortiz, 2007).

76 The intended reader’s name, Teófilo, alludes to the intended audience in the prologue to the Gospel of Luke. It also evokes the name of a prominent member of the Claretian religious community of priests and monks, Teófilo Cabestrero. Cabestrero was charged with reporting for left-leaning Catholic publications Vida nueva and Vida religiosa, and as a result was officially prohibited from reporting on Pope John Paul II’s 1979 visit to Mexico (Rosa 286). 77 This emphasis on Jesus as an example rather than as saviour is also found in Arian theology. For further information on Arian theology see Rowan William’s Arius: History and Tradition.

159 desmitificador” (9). Diligently taking each heading in the Jerusalem Bible to tell his own stories,

Gavilán states, “[s]ólo un alarde de cinismo literario podía forzar los hechos a tales extremos, pero no encontré una manera mejor de reescribir el evangelio de Lucas con estricta fidelidad a su estructura y a su espíritu” (10). By using this structure and these images, then, the novel portrays

Mexican society and communicates what it understands as the Gospel’s spirit.

In the first part of my analysis I pay special attention to the ways the novel reflects its context. The novel and its protagonist Jesucristo Gómez speak to diverse issues, such as the need to reform the ejido system (36-7; 45-8; 109-11; 111-14); the Catholic Church (252-53; 264; 266-

8); and the health care system (66-70; 70-2). It advocates for gay rights (133-42) and the indigenous struggle for recognition in Chiapas (286-89).78 I then consider the novel’s form and posit that by adapting the Gospel part by part, the novel presents a confining narrative structure.

This imitates the Mexican reality that, to many, did not allow for breathing room or creative thinking.79 On the other hand, following Linda Hutcheon’s theory of adaptation and Homi

Bhabha’s concept of mimicry, as well as cultural commentators Roger Bartra and Octavio Paz’s analyses, we see that the strategy of imitation allows the novel to point towards transformation.

This transformation is rooted in the novel’s focus, throughout its portrayal of Jesucristo’s life, ministry and death, on Jesucristo’s body. Then, through formulaic miracles, I suggest that the characters’ bodies blend into one another. This may be because, as Mario Sáenz has argued, the

Mexican intelligentsia often theorizes onto the masses, objectifying the latter into a submissive position (152).80 As they become a collective body, these characters connect to Jesucristo’s body

78 For further information about the ejido system see the introduction. 79 Nevertheless, Mexican cultural commentators, such as Carlos Monsiváis, leave us with an impressive body of critique from this time period (see for example his 1970 Días de guardar).

160 and reinforce Jesucristo’s embodied challenge to representatives and representations of the government, the Catholic Church, intellectuals and patriarchal family structure.

4.1 El evangelio Critiques its Historical and Political Context El evangelio was first published in 1979 and remains popular because of its faithful portrayal and well-developed critique of the Mexican context. In 2004, for instance, Gonzalo

Valdés Medellín stated that the novel’s criticisms of “la cristiandad, la mexicanidad y el guadalupanismo,” not to mention machismo, caciquismo and blind submission to political and religious dogma, remained valid (65). Its many adaptations confirm this. In 1980, almost immediately after the novel was published, it was adapted to the stage. That year, Fr. Abelardo

Treviño presented Los personajes de la pasión hoy en México in Mexico City and the

Albuquerque Theater Company presented La pasión de Jesús Chávez in New Mexico (Silvestre

Lagunas 89). In 1983, Leñero himself adapted the novel and it became the play Jesucristo

Gómez. The written work received positive reviews but, according to Vicente Leñero, as well as critics Raúl Díaz and Tomás Urtusastegui, when celebrated director Ignacio Retes mounted the play in 1987, it met with little success (R. Díaz 7; Leñero Vivir 107-11; Urtusastegui 15). The

80 Mexican intellectuals and members of the middle and upper classes, to which Leñero belonged, likely found it difficult to portray these social classes. Leñero, like other elites, may have found it difficult to imagine members of lower social classes as independent critical thinkers. A recent guide to Mexico for business people explains social class in this way: “in Mexico, your social class is your context” (Crouch 230). This guide adds that upper class Mexicans feel a duty to protect the less fortunate, even if they would never dream of speaking with them, eating together or inviting them into their homes (Crouch 238-9). El evangelio uses colloquial language to portray characters of lower social classes; however, since the narrator does not enter these characters’ minds, the characters remain uncomplicated (Caufield 110, 117). The novel’s failure to complicate characters from lower social classes represents a failure to humanize them.

161 novel continues to engage with the Mexican context. In 2009, it was adapted as Jesucristo

Gómez 2009 d.C., and presented in Iztapalapa, Mexico City (Cortés).81

The majority of the novel, that is, Jesucristo’s ministry, death and resurrection, takes place in the wake of the fictional Juan Bautista’s ministry. Chronologically, it occurs around

1975 or 1976, either as Luis Echeverría’s presidential term was ending, or José López Portillo’s was beginning (45). Juan Bautista’s ministry may also allude to the Party of the Poor conflict with the PRI in rural Guerrero between 1971 and 1974.82 In the late 1970s, power dynamics in

Mexico had shifted significantly from earlier relationships between the Church and State. The novel’s tendency to focus on characters’ bodies and present their existence as bare life, however, continues to illustrate patterns of repression in Mexico.

In the late 1970s, the Mexican government continued to make deals with intellectuals and religious leaders in order to assert its power. Here I turn to Williams’ The Mexican Exception, as it proves useful in this discussion of State power. Williams’ analysis of Mexican culture and history centers on moments of encounter between powerful and powerless, and employs the vocabulary of police and state violence to suggest that the State or sovereign commands and that the police follows this command to regularize ways of doing, being and saying (13). I agree with

Williams’ understanding of totalizing forces as part of a police state. Still, in this chapter, as in others, I employ Althusser’s vocabulary of State and ISAs, as it reinforces the distance that the

Mexican government maintained existed even as the it made alliances with intellectuals and appropriated the Church and family structure as its own.

81 Mounting the play in Iztapalapa relates, in part, to the novel’s focus on the Iztapalapa community. It may also respond to the fact that, according to Carlos Monsiváis, Iztapalapa is the area of Mexico City most likely to perform Passion Plays on Good Friday, which commemorate Christ’s crucifixion and death (Apocalipstick 324-5). 82 For more information see Williams pp. 165-80.

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In the 1970s, State representatives, such as bureaucrats, union leaders and the ejido commission exerted power onto ordinary people, not unlike José Gómez and María David, the fictional parents of Jesucristo Gómez, the fictional Jesus, in El evangelio. The PRI government brought corruption to each level of society by creating a monstrous democracy in which each person would take advantage of their power and position to exploit others. This party also continued to sponsor large parts of the intellectual realm, through newspapers, awards and presses; nevertheless, clear instances of government-sponsored repression in 1968 and 1971 meant that the already contentious relationship between the State and intellectuals became more complex. At the same time, the medical system, largely controlled by the government, was structured so that it would be unable to assist low-income people, like the characters in Leñero’s novel.

The Catholic Church had embedded itself in the State system in the 1940s and 1950s; but, facing growing secularization throughout the 1960s, it changed its ways in order to gain approval from Mexicans (Loaeza “La iglesia y la democracia” 161). The Church’s hierarchy, religious education and training systems and, in particular, images and presence of the Virgin of

Guadalupe and the bleeding Christ acted with power over Catholic people. Family structure, significantly influenced by the Church, strongly emphasized women’s maternal and emotional role, although greater numbers of women participated in the remunerated workforce by the

1970s.

4.1.1 Representing a Repressive State In earlier decades, economic development had given the PRI popular approval; El evangelio reflects the end of this period of unprecedented economic growth and modernization.

From 1962, when Castellanos’ novel was published, to 1979, when Leñero’s first appeared,

Mexico had experienced four separate presidencies, including repression of striking workers

163 under Adolfo López Mateos (1958-1964), repression of students under Gustavo Díaz Ordaz

(1964-1970), severe economic downturn under Luis Echeverría (1970-1976) and it would experience oil-related prosperity and crisis under José López Portillo (1976-1982), which, according to Williams, would mark the end of Mexico’s modern period (11-12).

The revolutionary character Juan Bautista, leader of the fictional Frente Común, serves as a placeholder for the years I do not include in my study, 1962-1975. As a revolutionary leader, he criticized every sector of the Mexican economy and set the stage for social transformation.

Perhaps, as Bosteels has argued in relation to Revueltas, the Frente Común, like Revueltas’ essays, reflects the desire that “what did not happen, be made to happen” (95, emphasis in text). I extend Bosteels’ argument to suggest that Juan Bautista’s complaints are analogous to an imagined trajectory that began with the 1968 student protests and would end in Jesucristo

Gómez’s movement for social transformation rather than with soldiers opening fire on protestors on October 2. Juan Bautista lambasts public officials, people from lower social classes and the

Church:

– ¡Hijos de la chingada! – les gritaba frente a las oficinas públicas, en las plazas, en los

atrios, en pleno mercado –. ¡Un día de éstos les va a llegar su hora, y ya verán!

También les agarraba contra los humildes que no sabían sino quejarse:

– ¡Bola de pendejos, defiéndanse, no se dejan explotar!

Con los mochos y los beatos de la iglesia, no tenía compasión:

– ¡Me limpio con sus novenarios! En lugar de tanta rezadera, lo que Dios quiere de

ustedes es que hagan algo contra esta pinche situación de injusticia. (46)

In the fictional early 1970s, Juan Bautista unites disparate movements for social justice in a way that after 1968, Mexicans did not. It is not my intention to unearth the accuracy of the novel’s

164 representation of its historical context; I aim to use its vignettes that focus on its characters’ bodies to illustrate oppression and outline its gestures towards social change.

The reality was more complex. According to José Agustín, by the time Echeverría came to power in 1970, Mexico’s economy had deteriorated significantly and included “la devastación de la naturaleza, el desperdicio de recursos, la corrupción, la sobrepoblación, la injustísima distribución de la riqueza, la dependencia del exterior y el paternalismo antidemocrático”

(Tragicomedia mexicana 2 11). Judging president Echeverría, Agustín states, “sus excesos en el uso del poder también se volverían emblemáticos de la corrupción y de la decadencia del sistema político mexicano” (Tragicomedia mexicana 2 120). In other words, Echeverría was the representative of a weak and corrupt State that exerted excessive power to control its population.

Under Echeverría, institutions, such as the CTM and CNC, remained central to the PRI’s mandate. As Leñero argues in an editorial in Excelsior, union leaders, “carentes de toda sensibilidad autocrítica,” refused to critique their own actions or the government that sponsored them (“Mal nacional” 6A). Rosario Castellanos, in an editorial for the same newspaper, observes that the CTM was incompetent, abused authority and ignored the law. Instead of solving economic or labour problems, the CTM focussed on rooting out communists within its ranks

(Castellanos “Lepra de este siglo” 181-2).

The main opposition party, the PAN, did not participate in the 1976 presidential election, and so Mexican electoral democracy lost any remaining credibility. Historian Daniel Cosío

Villegas is said to have labelled Mexico’s political system “una disneylandia democrática”

(Agustín Tragicomedia mexicana 2 22). When López Portillo came to power in 1976, he faced a country with inflation, recession, currency devaluation, unemployment, suspicion and mistrust, as well as destabilized prices, salaries and utility costs (Agustín Tragicomedia mexicana 2 123).

This is because in 1975, “Democratic Disneyland” had become chaos. The country entered an

165 economic crisis and began debt-restructuring negotiations with the IMF (Aguilar Camín and L.

Meyer 202). Labour unrest, moreover, challenged the PRI’s longstanding control of organized labour unions. In CTM meetings, workers began to attack the party (Leñero “Contradicciones”

6A). Still, instead of dealing with this criticism, the PRI continued the strategy it had begun in the 1950s and 1960s, and repressed striking workers in many sectors (Agustín Tragicomedia mexicana 2 136-7).

The novel’s portrayal of its characters’ bodies and almost-physical weariness at government procedure bring this corruption and injustice to light. It begins as Jesucristo’s parents confront the ejido system and governmental bureaucracy. His mother, María David, becomes unexpectedly pregnant, and marries her boyfriend, José Gómez. In an egalitarian spirit,

José adds María’s name to his ejido title (24). Shortly after their marriage, the government expropriates their part of the communal landholding for a highway without compensation, and so

José and María decide to go to Mexico City to receive their due. When they arrive in the city, they go to an office other members of their community had suggested to them. “Toda la mañana y toda la tarde duró el calvario… De Herodes a Pilatos los trajeron de edificio a edificio, y de oficina a oficina. Que firme aquí y que firme allá, que llene un formulario…” (26). The Mexican bureaucracy confuses these characters, and, as they attempt to navigate its maze, they become objects that need to stand in line, buy “timbres fiscales” and sign forms (26). Even after they walk through Mexico’s bureaucratic maze, José Gómez and María David only receive a third of the compensation they deserved “porque el abogadillo del comisario ejidal inventó quién sabe cuántos gastos y repartos entre los funcionarios de la capital” (36). The novel emphasizes how low-level officials, such as lawyers, bureaucrats and members of the ejido commission, take advantage of what little power they have to exploit others. Moreover, the novel’s portrayal of

José and María’s experience emphasizes their similarity to other Mexicans and denies the

166 uniqueness of their struggle. In this way, the text conveys the Mexican State’s corruption, inefficiency, and the way it confuses its subjects.

4.1.2 Confronting a Segregated Medical System The government-sponsored medical system reinforces these tendencies. In early 20th century Mexico, scientists had gained credibility by putting forth their ideas as solutions to

Mexico’s social problems, and as we saw in the third chapter, constructed particular groups, such as alcoholics, as enemies of the nation. We saw how a doctor in Revueltas’ story “El hijo tonto” controlled a female character, Mariana, by diagnosing her with tuberculosis. For most Mexicans, by the 1970s, science and medicine were seen as the solution to illness. According to Julio

Frenk, former Secretary of Health in Mexico (2000-2006):

the period from 1958 to 1967 witnessed an accelerated expansion of the health sector. At

the same time, the paradigm of ‘scientific medicine’ became definitively established as

the dominant form of structuring medical work and the State consolidated its position as

the main source of medical care in Mexico. (149)

El evangelio coincides with these tendencies: characters label one another’s illnesses. The pepenadores’ (garbage-pickers) neighbourhood in Iztapalapa, for example, is blighted by sickness, including children with dysentery and dehydration, women with cramps and muscle spasms and paralyzed older people (70). Vomit, typhoid, fever, meningitis, convulsions, diarrhoea and eye problems also plague the community (70). This reduces the characters to their corporeality and prevents them from being seen as anything other than their illnesses.

In other cases, doctors, clinics and hospitals become representatives of the government and dehumanize other characters. Frenk explains that the Mexican health care system has several tiers: state workers and their families are covered by the Social Security Institute for State

Workers (ISSTE), wage earners are covered by the Mexican Social Security Institute (IMSS),

167 those of independent means can access private clinics, and people who do not “belong to one of the specific clienteles of the social security agencies are not allowed to utilize their medical services” (146). In other words, those who do not qualify for any of these agencies, because their economic activity is part of the informal sector, rely on public assistance. When María David goes into labour, for instance, and is unable to reach a hospital, her attendants, prostitutes at a pay-by-the-hour motel, call the Red Cross for help (30). When the Red Cross never arrives, the novel alludes to this inefficient public assistance. In Mexico, since race and class are related to one another, the medical system, according to Frenk, “resembles a sort of ‘medical apartheid,’ except that segregation is not based on race but on occupation and income” (146). Workers in the medical system act on State power. For example, when doctors went on strike in 1964, because they felt that there was too much work and not enough pay, the State repressed them by denying them the ability to form a trade union and refusing to negotiate with them (Frenk 150). Thus, the government channels its power and funds through an unjust and inefficient apparatus that responds to Mexicans based on their economic status and participation in the formal economy.

One of Jesucristo’s disciples, Pedro Simón, has a sick mother-in-law. As a garbage-picker and member of the informal economy, he has no right to access the IMSS clinic. Still, Jesucristo tells Pedro Simón to take his mother-in-law there:

En la clínica se armó el jaleo de rigor. –Son cálculos biliares –diagnosticó el médico de

urgencias–. Le podemos dar algo para el cólico, pero hay que internarla y operar.

–Pues opérela.

–Ya les dije que no puede ser, sólo atendemos a los asegurados. (68-9)

In this exchange, the doctor, a representative of the medical system, reduces Pedro Simón’s mother-in-law to her gallstones and the government’s insurance schemes prevent this doctor from giving the older woman the operation she needs.

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4.1.3 Leñero and El evangelio Reject Intellectual Power Structures At the same time as the medical system underwent significant changes, the situation of

Mexican intellectuals remained largely the same. Throughout the 20th century, Mexican intellectuals experienced a complicated relationship with the government. The government provided much-needed funds for their work; on the other hand, this work is sharply critical of its source of funding. According to literary critic Claudia Schaefer, under president Echeverría, the bourgeoisie, including intellectuals, retreated from social crises by participating closely in State activities (62-3, 86). In the lead up to Echeverría’s election, for instance, Carlos Fuentes is reported to have stated that the choice was either Echeverría or fascism (Amador and Ponce).83

As intellectuals remembered the government-orchestrated Tlatelolco massacre and the subsequent paramilitary attacks on students on Corpus Christi in 1971, they were reluctant to criticize the government.

At the same time, the PRI continued to promote its point of view through the media. It ensured its viewpoint would not be challenged by spreading its ideas through its television network, Televisa, and by influencing important literary and cultural figures through prestigious scholarships and prizes (Garrido 270-3). Leñero, unlike figures such as Juan Rulfo, did not receive many government-sponsored scholarships or awards.84 He was definitely not part of what Armando Pereira and Claudio Albarrán call the Mexican literary mafia (123-4).85 Leñero’s

83 This statement has been attributed to Fuentes, but the tendency was also present in the work of other prominent intellectuals such as Octavio Paz and Fernando Benítez. For more information on the expression “Echeverría o fascismo,” see Amador and Ponce’s article. 84 Although Leñero may not have been as famous as Juan Rulfo, he participated in Mexico City’s intellectual circles. Indeed, his 1998 one-act play, ¿Te acuerdas de Rulfo, Juan José Arreola? fictionalizes an interaction between Leñero and another prominent writer, Juan José Arreola, after Rulfo’s death. 85 This is not to say that Leñero did not win awards. He received two scholarships at the Centro Mexicano de Escritores, and several of his novels have won prizes. Walter Langford’s 1971 study of the Mexican novel,

169 novels, then, may critique the intellectual system in Mexico in a way that an author who consistently received government sponsored scholarships and prizes would not have.

In spite of his self-reported distance from the literary world, Leñero was an important journalist. His most significant position in the 1970s was as an editor of the daily newspaper

Excelsior. When then-president Echeverría paid lip service to open journalism, Excelsior took advantage of the opportunity and criticized the president. However, when economic downturn caused the private sector to stop advertising in the newspaper, and the government stepped in to finance the paper, Excelsior’s critical stance became problematic. The government sought out a group of journalists who opposed Excelsior’s Editor-in-Chief Julio Scherer García and its

General Manager Hero Rodríguez. In July 1976, when this group deposed both Scherer García and Rodríguez, Leñero formed part of another group that refused to collaborate with what they considered to be an illegitimate newspaper board (Agustín Tragicomedia mexicana 2 109-10).

By November of the same year, Leñero and a group of other journalists began publishing the magazine Proceso; in 1977, other disgruntled former journalists at Excelsior began the daily newspaper Unomásuno (Agustín Tragicomedia mexicana 2 110-1).86

El evangelio mirrors Leñero’s position as it critiques the Mexican intellectual context through embodied and vulgar imagery. One notable vignette adapts an encounter between Jesus and Beelzebub as a meeting between Jesucristo and a Professor of Moral Theology at an unnamed Seminary. This professor is angry that his favourite student, Virgilio, has decided to follow Jesucristo Gómez’s teaching rather than the Professor’s version of the teaching of Jesus

moreover, selected Leñero to represent emerging authors, given Leñero’s widespread recognition and for his proficiency in genres as varied as theatre, fiction and soap operas (152-3). 86 Leñero novelized this experience in Los periodistas (1978).

170

Christ. So, the Professor arranged a meeting to debate with Jesucristo (159). In this debate,

Jesucristo does not defend the impertinent student. Yet, Jesucristo’s responses, such as “¡Ya me tienen hasta los güevos!” use bodily imagery and colloquial language to demonstrate that he has no time for formal arguments based on Aristotelian logic (159). On another occasion, the novel re-imagines the story of the Good Samaritan as a Tertulia literaria, a literary gathering. At this

Tertulia, a character, José Luis Trejo Santibáñez, in favour of church reform, meets Jesucristo and asks Jesucristo what he needs to do to gain eternal life. Jesucristo reminds Trejo to love God with all his heart, soul and mind. As Trejo does not understand this answer, Jesucristo tells him a story about a man who was robbed on the highway (151). “Después de golpearlo y de robarle hasta la bicicleta, los asaltantes lo dejaron medio muerto en la cuneta, con medio cuerpo sobre el asfalto, sangrando” (152). Many, including a priest and a businessman, passed this half-dead man, until a man reputed to be a communist, womanizer and drunk, stopped to help him (153).

The helpless man’s body, bleeding on the asphalt, illustrates the indifferent nature of religious, economic and intellectual power in Mexico. Within the text, the Professor of Moral Theology, his student Virgilio and Trejo Santibáñez are intellectual figures. Although neither anecdote mentions their scholarships, prizes or publications, they are set in a Tertulia literaria and a

Seminary, which are places for intellectual discussion. In both cases, Jesucristo is sharply critical of intellectual characters and so, I would argue that through these vignettes, El evangelio counters the arrogance found in parts of the State-supported Mexican intellectual sphere.

4.1.4 Challenging the Church with Religious Imagery The Catholic Church maintained a religious monopoly in Mexico through its uncritical relationship with the PRI. Indeed, since 1940, the Mexican Catholic Church has been fully embedded in civil society and no longer attempts to be an actor in its own right (Muro González

543-4). Víctor Gabriel Muro González asserts that in the sixties the Church changed, as it began

171 to oppose then-president López Mateos. Their slogan became “cristianismo sí, comunismo no”

(548). Some Catholics aligned themselves with more reactionary groups in Mexico, such as the

Christian Family Movement (MFC) (Coral García 38). Other parts of the Catholic Church became involved in social mobilization and demanded change in the country, founding monasteries that used psychoanalysis or liberation theology (Coral García 45; Muro González

555).87

Both tendencies stem from the 1962-3 Second Vatican Council, which changed the face of the Catholic Church.88 After the Council, the Church sought greater lay involvement in its activities; priests faced their congregations and led mass in the local vernacular, in this case,

Spanish. People were also instructed to fully participate in the Eucharist. The Council thus encouraged people to pursue greater involvement in collective religious practice, especially the corporeal experience in which they would imbibe Jesus’ body and blood.

The novel emphasizes Jesucristo Gómez’s religious characteristics and his parallels to the life of Jesus Christ through an existing theological trend, liberation theology. El evangelio is thus in accordance with Leñero’s own anti-church and pro-God position. As Leñero stated in an interview with Beatriz Pages Rebollar, “[a] Dios le estorba lo religioso. Me he vuelto muy ácido de la tradición: de los Papas, de los templos, de los sacerdotes. Han sido ellos lo que han lastimado la idea de Dios” (“A Dios le estorba” 3).89

87 We see this connection to psychoanalysis in Leñero’s 1971 play Pueblo rechazado and in Rubén Gallo’s Freud’s Mexico. 88 In the late 1970s, the vast majority of Mexicans remained nominally Catholic. El evangelio does allude to a growing Protestant community. 89 Criticizing the Catholic Church with religious imagery is a common strategy in Leñero’s work. His novels, short stories and plays often employ religious concepts to emphasize their overarching ideas. Religion pervades Leñero’s first short story collection, La polvareda (1959) and frames the novel’s portrayal of changes to rural society and migration to cities (Niño 31). A later novel, La voz adolorida (1961) uses religion to underline the privileged class’ rigid beliefs, and suggests that this rigidity makes people neurotic and crazy (Niño 55, 60). El juicio (1972) and

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Pope John Paul II visited Mexico in his first trip abroad in 1979 and his interest in

Mexican Catholicism, particularly the Virgin of Guadalupe, endeared him to Mexican Catholics

(Agustín Tragicomedia mexicana 2 166-7). The Pope, however, confined his visit to primarily conservative areas of Mexico State, Puebla, Guadalajara and Monterrey and avoided or spent little time in indigenous and left-leaning areas such as Oaxaca, Chiapas and Mexico City (Rosa

286). The novel may satirize the Pope’s visit and his immense popularity when characters in the text treat Jesucristo in the same way that Mexicans treated the Pope, by practically assaulting him.

This challenge to the official church and to the Papal visit continues as the novel emphasizes Mary’s body and refuses to venerate Mary in a singular, “pure” way. Instead of the annunciation, María visits a local midwife, doña Gabi. Doña Gabi tells her that there is no need to worry about her unexpected pregnancy: “si quieres yo puedo arreglarlo, todavía estamos a tiempo…Te dejo como nueva, no te pasa nada. Piénsalo” (22). The midwife offers an abortion and possibly a hymen restoration, which demonstrates that María was not in a position to have a child for economic and personal reasons. This episode subtly implies that the Virgin Mary may have thought the same thing.

The novel further challenges guadalupanismo, Mexico’s veneration of the Virgin of

Guadalupe, when it portrays Jesucristo and his followers’ visit to her Basílica in Mexico City.

The episode presents the Guadalupe’s quasi-theme park, where people wait in line to see the

Virgin’s apparition on Juan Diego’s cloak, after they have already walked through vendors of religious trinkets and people who hope for charity from religious tourists. In this episode, the

Redil de ovejas (1962) propose that the Church adapt to its context, abandon conservatism and pay attention to individuals’ needs (Niño 156).

173 novel critiques the church’s purported need for financial contributions and stresses the distance between who Mary was and what the Guadalupe has become for Mexicans. In the novel, an unidentified man asks Jesucristo to donate money towards building a new Basílica, a project undertaken between 1974 and 1976. Next to him sits a ragged old man, who sings and begs pilgrims for money. In sharp contrast to the Basílica’s greed, this man actually appears to need assistance. Jesucristo also notices that a woman so old that she is stooped over walks towards the old man. Her trembling hand reaches into an ixtle bag, made of agave fibre, and she deposits a few coins in the old singer’s calloused hand (266). The begging man and the stooped woman juxtaposed with the Church official point to the nature of religious oppression in Mexico. The presence of all three characters in the Basílica suggests that all Mexicans are embedded in this system.

The novel continues to criticize Church corruption through its characters’ bodies in an episode that recreates the “Expulsión de los vendedores del Templo. Jesús enseña en el Templo

(19, 45-48)” (252-3). In this story, Jesucristo attends noon mass in a wealthy neighbourhood in

Mexico City, the Lomas de Chapultepec. Instead of sitting silently, crossing himself, kneeling, singing and praying, as a Catholic mass generally requires, Jesucristo begins a shouting match with the priest. He walks to the chancel at the front of the church and attacks the altar. “Derribó a manotazos los objetos litúrgicos: el missal, el crucifijo, el cáliz, las hostias a consagrar…Acusaba a sacerdotes y fieles de haber convertido los templos en tumbas de Dios, en salones de modas, en sucursales bancarias” (253). Jesucristo’s anger leads him to interrupt the conventional physical actions of mass with more noteworthy movements. El evangelio thus emphasizes Jesucristo’s physical response to the religious system that removes psychical

174 corporeality or embodied subjectivity.90 In other words, the novel demonstrates that the Church reinforces a division of mind and body among its adherents. By emphasizing Jesucristo’s spontaneous acts, the novel humanizes Jesucristo and other recognizable religious figures to challenge the Papal visit, Church corruption and religious complacency.

4.1.5 El evangelio at Home: Family Structure in Mexico The role of women in Mexico continued to relate to the notion of the perfect mother,

Mary, and men and women remained embedded in a patriarchal system. In the 1970s, women, particularly from the middle or upper classes, experienced greater opportunities. In 1974,

Rogelio Díaz Guerrero synthesized a 1969 study on women’s attitudes in Mexico that alludes to these changes. He concludes that women want to be independent and have better professional opportunities and that they do not want to be subordinate to men (Díaz Guerrero 15). This psychologist’s emphasis on female emotion shocks the contemporary reader of his work. He states that women enjoy:

un gran número de oportunidades para el desarrollo de su vida emotiva y de su papel

específico de feminidad. Hay además, suficientes datos para indicar que la mujer

mexicana está en general contenta con su papel de mujer. Por otra parte, es clarísimo ya,

que cada día está menos satisfecha de las oportunidades que se le ofrecen. (16)

Díaz Guerrero thus suggests that women should continue to adhere to the feminine ideal of a devoted wife, mother or daughter even as they pursue higher education or employment.

In the novel, Jesucristo, a male character, has many female followers, and in some ways, he and his ministry perpetuate patriarchal structures. The description of two of his friends, Marta

90 Elizabeth Grosz presents these terms one after another as if they were almost synonymous, one emphasizing the embodied nature of subjectivity or agency, and the other, psychical or mental nature of sensory experience (22). Here I present both to emphasize how El evangelio’s Jesucristo surpasses a dualistic vision of humanity.

175 and María Jiménez, illustrates the situation of women at in the 1970s. Marta, “a los dos meses de casada perdió a su primer marido, y el segundo la abandonó después de hacerle tres hijos y de envejecerla a insultos. Atareada todo el día en conseguir ropa para que sus niños no anduvieran hechos garras” (154). At one point, she complains to Jesucristo that she has no man to protect her and her land (156). Marta’s daily work and past suffering have exhausted and aged her. She does not have the time to reflect on whether she would like more opportunities. Marta’s story, moreover, shows that within the patriarchal system, women depended on men for economic and social status. In contrast:

A María no le había ido tan mal, aunque también tenía sus penas, como todos: la pena de

ser estéril, la pena de no haber heredado ni un cachito de las tierras de temporal, la pena

larga de saber a su marido sin trabajo cuando lo echaron de la fábrica de hilados por

alborotador. Pero todas eran penas soportables de las que al fin de cuentas salió adelante

María gracias a su buena salud, a que su marido no la golpeaba nunca y a que consiguió

trabajo de maestra en la escuela rural. (155)

This description focuses on María’s purported sterility, pointing out that in her context, she should have had no economic or social status. Nevertheless, a satisfying job, membership in the powerful teachers’ union, and the absence of an all-too-common abusive relationship afford her the opportunities to which Muro González alludes.

4.2 Formal Structure in the Novel: Confining and Liberating I now turn to the novel’s form, which bridges my comments on the novel’s corporeal mode of representation of governmental, medical, intellectual, religious and patriarchal power and my argument that those repressed by these entities can also be seen as part of a collective corporeal resistance. El evangelio follows the Spanish version of the Jerusalem Bible, and, occasionally the Good News Bible, to adapt the Gospel of Luke. It divides its account into seven

176 sections, which go from before Jesus’ birth to his resurrection (9).91 Each section is then divided into a series of episodes that follow italicized subtitles taken from the Gospel of Luke.

In each episode, El evangelio’s narrative voice remains in control, often through lengthy descriptions and direct links to the biblical text. Critic Catherine L. Caufield notes that the third person narrative voice has no focalization, that is, it is not focused on a specific character, and that by having no focalization, this narrative voice does enter the mind of any of its characters and emphasizes characters’ bodies at the expense of other qualities (111). The “deixis of reference” or reference point in the novel thus becomes the narrator and not the characters, “for the story is communicated through Gavilán’s telling, not through the characters themselves”

(Caufield 117).92 In episodes that include dialogue, characters’ speech enriches the text and proves that the novel is allied with the popular classes (Caufield 116-7). Alejandro de la Garza adds that Leñero’s overall work exhibits “un geómetra, un diseño técnico emparentado con la frialdad en el cálculo calificada como ‘deshumanizada’ por José Donoso” (81). El evangelio’s geometrically designed form coincides with the surrounding political and social climate that sought to control the Mexican people by dehumanizing them and removing their ability to think or act independently.

By following the Gospel of Luke’s pattern rather than relying on a traditional plot structure, the novel, moreover, fails to provide a resolution. It relies almost exclusively on the biblical headings, and since these headings were added to the biblical text for greater understanding and not part of the initial flow of events, these headings challenge the usual order

91 Each of these sections was originally preceded by black and white reproductions of woodcuts that depict events in the life of Jesus of Nazareth (Caufield 115). Joaquín Mortiz’s 2007 edition of the novel maintains the original structural markings but eliminates the woodcuts. 92 Caufield does not distinguish between the novel’s narrator and its implied author, Lucas Gavilán.

177 of cause and effect. For example, the novel presents the episode that describes Jesucristo’s friendship with Marta and María Jiménez in between the episode where he confronts José Luis

Trejo Santibáñez and an episode where he teaches his disciples how to pray for justice (149-

158). This juxtaposition of four important themes: church reform, friendship, patriarchy and justice, means no theme gains precedence over another. The novel’s dependence on headings likewise prevents it from developing a consistent attitude towards any social problem. I extend

Brushwood’s argument that literature that invites a reader response emphasizes the reading process over a final work of fiction; according to Brushwood, innovative form common in Latin

American literature from the time period is initially satisfying but ultimately causes the reader anxiety (Narrative Innovation 74). He goes on to connect these formal innovations to the surrounding political climate, and contends that this literature mirrors the shift in Mexican politics under Echeverría, to “process” rather than “product,” or to appearances rather than appearances of results (Narrative Innovation 77). El evangelio, as an adaptation of the biblical text, does not employ the same innovations as its contemporaries. Nevertheless, we can argue that El evangelio’s inconsistent position, continual intertextual engagement with the biblical text and the fact that it does not introduce a conflict to later resolve it, reflects the absence of a final product or novel in the conventional sense. Using Brushwood’s approach, this can be seen as imitating the surrounding political context in Mexico.

The fact that the novel follows the biblical text so closely limits the text in some ways. El evangelio does not, for example, follow its description of Marta and María Jiménez with another vignette on a similar topic about family, friendship or relationship between men and women. In accordance with the biblical text, it moves on to an adaptation of the Our Father (156-7).

Although these vignettes allow the novel to deal with injustice in diverse arenas, the text does not engage with any issue in a consistent way, which limits what it is able to tell. In this way, this

178 chapter builds on the second chapter’s argument regarding the relationship between first-person narrators in El llano en llamas, and the consolidation of power in the Mexican government, and the third chapter’s discussion of the analogous relationship between shifting narrators in

Castellanos’ novel and López Mateos’ governing strategies. Here I argue that the novel’s commitment to adapting the biblical text through brief and diverse vignettes relates to the way the PRI limited people’s opportunities to organize independent unions or political parties, and its monopoly over the intellectual context. This limitation is also like the way the Catholic Church limited people’s opportunities to create alternative understandings of Christianity, and the way the Mexican Catholic Church limited the understandings of Jesus’ life and the possibility that

Jesus could model social change by venerating the Virgin of Guadalupe. By translating every biblical episode, then, El evangelio becomes a space that imitates the social structures it sets out to critique.

The novel, moreover, re-imagines Jesus’ life with a tendency towards liberation theology and social realism. For this reason, critics have occasionally maligned El evangelio. Manuel

Capetillo, for instance, considers that the novel and the play that follows have no artistic merit, as they serve only to advance an ideologically based social critique (18, 21).93 Although Leñero was not a communist, nor a proponent of social realism, El evangelio’s boring and repetitive form do remind us of this genre. Social realism seeks to portray the life of the everyday person; when it became the official aesthetic ideology in the Soviet Union, social realism lent itself to a similar genre, socialist realism (Clark 10). Indeed, measures were taken to ensure texts conformed to an established formal pattern, based on epithets, catch phrases, stock images, and

93 El evangelio does not exclusively advance liberation theology. Caufield proposes that “Jesucristo Gómez does not engage in community-building and the maintenance of solidarity, important tasks from a liberation perspective” (126). Jesucristo Gómez does not work within an organized structure through which he would influence systematic change.

179 the conventional ordering of events (Clark 10, 13). Latin American examples of social realism include Ernesto “Che” Guevara’s Diarios de motocicleta based on a 1952 tour of South America and Revueltas’ 1957 novel Los motivos de Caín. Leñero’s novel, however, infuses social realism with religious beliefs and thus reminds us more of 19th century American homiletic novels, which used a repetitive structure to convey a religious and social message (Jackson 645).

Although some have maligned these novels, according to critic Gregory S. Jackson, by imitating

19th century sermons, they became more accessible to their readers (646-7). In light of Jackson’s observations, I suggest that El evangelio’s repetitive form and religious imagery mirror a confining political context even as they allowed it to be more accessible to its initial audience.

The novel, moreover, is an adaptation or translation, which has been seen both as a derivative and as a creative space. Homi Bhabha asserts that we are taught to think of mimicry or imitation as negative (86) and Octavio Paz’s concept of Mexican masks follows this negative understanding of imitation and mimicry. In 1950, Paz argued that Mexicans figuratively masked themselves for self-preservation and closed themselves off from others by changing appearance and adapting to their surroundings (26, 39). On the other hand, as Bhabha also affirms,

“[m]imicry is…a complex strategy of reform, regulation and discipline, which ‘appropriates’ the

Other as it visualizes power” (87). The complexity of masks and mimicry, which Paz calls

“psychic oscillations,” thus might also have positive potential (64). Roger Bartra’s analysis of the axolotl shapes my understanding of this potential, as it illuminates the strategy of adaptation in the Mexican context. Bartra’s 1987 monographic essay La jaula de la melancolía: identidad y metamorfosis del mexicano likens the axolotl or salamander to Mexicans: just as the amphibian reaches sexual maturity before becoming a salamander, Mexicans, too, exist in a stagnant almost-adulthood. As a result, “el anfibio había sido condenado a ser símbolo, signo y máscara”

(Bartra 203). On the other hand, Bartra also states that the axolotl’s symbolic status is a life-

180 giving force (203). This life-giving and condemned figure demonstrates the fluidity of masks and imitation in Mexico. By adopting the Catholic mask, El evangelio points to religious symbols, signs and perhaps to what Paz considers the Mexican affinity for hiding behind masks. On the other hand, this text depends on a rigid form to portray historical, political and social injustice.

Linda Hutcheon also focuses on the constructive aspects of imitation. Her Theory of Adaptation defines adaptation as “an acknowledged transposition of a recognizable other work or works”

(Hutcheon 8). As such, it is a “creative and an interpretive act of appropriation/salvaging; [an] extended intertextual engagement with the adapted work. Therefore, an adaptation is a derivation that is not derivative—a work that is second without being secondary” (8-9). The novel’s rigid structure imitates oppressive structures of power while at the same time creating the option for resistance.

This option rests primarily on the way the novel stresses the human body. By emphasizing Jesucristo’s body, the novel implicitly links Jesucristo to other characters, and when the novel discusses Jesucristo’s formulaic miracles, it gives characters similar illnesses to one other and to Jesucristo. As I read them as an assemblage, I suggest that these similarities challenge the life-depleting Church, family structure, intellectual circles, medical system and government in the text.

4.3 El evangelio Emphasizes Jesucristo’s Humanity The novel follows literary and artistic history to portray Jesucristo’s life through his body, or what Elizabeth Grosz might call Jesucristo’s body image. According to Grosz, the body image “unifies and coordinates postural, tactile, kinesthetic and visual sensations so that these are experienced as the sensations of a subject coordinated into a single space” (83). This embodied portrayal evokes the omnipresent statues and images of the bleeding and humiliated

Christ in Mexico. Paz argues that this Jesus is portrayed this way in Mexico because his blood

181 evokes Cuauhtémoc’s dying body (75-6). Cuauhtémoc was an indigenous leader, who heroically fought the Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés. According to Paz, allusions to Cuauhtémoc through Jesus’ body thus instil pride among Mexican Catholics (75-6), and, by extension, in the novel’s Mexican characters and readers. Contemporary Mexican painters also deal with Jesus’ omnipresent body. Gustavo Monroy’s Autorretrato, for example, purportedly a self-portrait, presents a Christ-like image superimposed on a re-imagined map of Mexico. This Christ has one normal eye accompanied by a bleeding, empty, socket. Monroy/Christ’s hands then present two bleeding eyes instead of the stigmata (Monroy). Monroy’s painting echoes the novel, as both underline Jesus and Jesucristo’s humanity to connect him to the other people, or to the novel’s human characters.

Jesucristo’s baptism acknowledges his humanity through his perceived need for salvation

(32-6). Ana la Caraja and Simeón Terrones’ physical responses to this ceremony emphasize their corporeality and tie their bodies to Jesucristo’s. The episode begins by criticizing church corruption: María tries to persuade José to have Jesucristo baptized but José balks because they do not have enough money to pay the priest for a service that should be available at no cost.

Nevertheless, María wins the argument and they arrange for Jesucristo’s baptism (32-3). The baptism takes place during a dust storm and for this reason it draws a large audience that includes Simeón and Ana:

Los dos eran pordioseros y ni de casualidad se perdían un bautizo, una boda, una misa de

difuntos. Primero se plantaban a la entrada de la iglesia con la mano estirada, pidiendo

una limosna por amor de Dios, y luego se metían un rato a disfrutar de la ceremonia; nada

más un rato: salían antes que salieran los primeros para cosechar de la emoción y de los

buenos propósitos la caridad de las almas piadosas. (33-4)

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We learn that Simeón is blind and likely crazy; from time to time, the municipal guard puts him in jail. Ana fares no better. The novel gives her a vulgar nickname, la Caraja, and tells us she is reputed to be a witch who brings young girls to brothels (34). This hints at Ana’s uncontained sexuality and reminds us of Mercedes in Oficio de tinieblas and Celestina, the protagonist of the late medieval novel in dialogue La Celestina. In the latter novel, a character sarcastically discloses that Celestina “remediava por caridad muchas huérfanas y erradas que se encomendavan a ella” (112). As noted in the second chapter with regards to Mercedes, Ana’s links with delinquent sexuality critique the negative effects of urbanization in the 1970s and link

Jesucristo’s life to a changing social context. After establishing Simeón and Ana’s unusual bodies and behaviour, the novel attempts to return to the ceremony, but Ana and Simeón prevent this from happening. When the priest is about to pour the water:

el anciano ciego [Simeón] empezó a dar de gritos. Todos pensaron que se trataba de un

ataque, pero los suyos eran gritos de alegría. Entonces se puso a cantar. Estaba cantando

el Bendito, bendito, bendito sea Dios, cuando se le aventaron encima. Quisieron echarlo

de la iglesia pero el ciego escapó saltando por las bancas: tropezó con un respaldo, cayó

al suelo, de boca. Sangrando del labio quedó tendido en el pasillo central. (34-5)

In this bloody state, Simeón cries out: “¡Regresó Jesucristo al mundo! ¡Regresó para salvarnos!” and Ana adds “¡Bendito sea el nombre de Jesucristo!” (35). Simeón tells María that although he is blind, he has seen salvation. Blindness, in accordance with Vieira’s assertions, is tied to the transformation of the individual into a subject, and “opens the path for a reflection on power relations and on the possibility of agency predicated on collective subjectivity” (98). As Simeón and Ana physically derail Jesucristo’s baptism to prevent the priest, a representative of the corrupt Catholic Church, from finishing the ceremony, they connect to Jesucristo’s later challenge to the oiled machine of political corruption and religious apathy.

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The novel’s adaptation of Jesus’ death and resurrection, which highlights Jesucristo’s corporeality, also connects him to others (294-301). Throughout the novel, Jesucristo Gómez had allied himself with popular resistance movements and indigenous uprising, which eventually leads to his arrest. The police claim he is dangerous, and, through the “Camino del Calvario,” they transfer him to the Campo Militar, a jail in Toluca, Mexico State, on the outskirts of Mexico

City. In the scenes that precede Jesucristo’s death, the novel pays significant attention to his physical condition. This reminds us of Revueltas’ experience as a prisoner in Lecumberri, where he saw guards physically abusing other prisoners (México 68 211-3). In the novel, Jesucristo, like Revueltas in his essays, challenges corruption and excessive use of force:

Desde que estaba en la celda de la procuraduría de Toluca había empezado a sufrir…

parecía como si de un momento a otro fuera a arrojar las vísceras y el alma misma;

terminaba ahogándose, sangrando por la boca, sacudido por los escalofríos. Después: la

respiración jadeante, fatigosa. (295)

The novel focuses on Jesucristo’s degraded body just as Oficio focused on Domingo as an open sore during his crucifixion and the teacher’s body on a stick in “Dios en la tierra.” Returning to

Bosteels’ interpretation of Revueltas’ essays about the 1968 protests as a reflection of the desire to make what did not happen, happen (95), I propose reading “Dios en la tierra,” Oficio and El evangelio so that what does not happen in El evangelio, is made to happen. In other words,

Domingo’s death in Oficio and the teacher’s crucifixion in “Dios en la tierra” flesh out

Jesucristo’s suffering in El evangelio and create an intertextual bond that might allow each of their moments of resistance to follow an alternative literary trajectory and effect the change in education to which the teacher points, in race and class relations sought in Oficio and religion in

El evangelio. Moreover, Jesucristo’s arrest and blood also evoke Simeón, a previously jailed man who bled at Jesucristo’s baptism, and so the novel joins the beginning of Jesucristo’s life to its

184 end. Through what Puar would stress as an encounter that effectively annihilates Jesucristo’s self, the text creates connections that allow Jesucristo to become part of a collective body (Puar

“Prognosis Time” 167). At the same time, Jesucristo’s body, which is modelled after Christ’s, already a kind of intercorporeal entity. Christ’s body is understood as literally eaten by his

Catholic followers, and is metaphorically remembered by other Christians; and as members of the Church, Catholics or Protestants would likely consider themselves members of the Body of

Christ. Based on the theoretical and religious precedent, even as Jesucristo dies, his connection to Jesus Christ and persistent challenge to unjust power in the novel connects the collective body and social transformation.

Then the other prisoners ask Jesucristo what he had done. Jesucristo, sweating profusely, coughs, and when he recovers, his eyes fill with tears and blood drips from his mouth (298). “Se enderezó sobre las rodillas desesperado, ahogándose…Con las manos crispadas se sujetó el cuello. Se tensaron sus músculos. Se puso tieso…” (299). Jesucristo dies with his eyes wide open and his face submerged in blood and vomit (299). Here the novel points out what Leo Steinberg calls Christ’s “humanation” and “the earnestness of self-sacrifice” (“The Sexuality of Christ”

50). As Steinberg astutely observes in his analysis of Christ’s sexuality in Renaissance art,

Renaissance painters rendered “the incarnate Christ ever more unmistakably flesh and blood” so as to testify to God’s greatest achievement, taking on human form (“The Sexuality of Christ”

10). Jesucristo’s bodily excretions, then, fulfill the goal of literary and artistic portrayals of

Jesus’ dying body.

The episode that accounts for Jesucristo’s resurrection continues to highlight Jesucristo’s corporeality and link him to other characters in the novel and in other texts (305-8). Initially,

Jesucristo’s followers do not know that he had died in the transfer to the Campo Militar. A government official, don Pepe Artime, breaks out of the bureaucratic maze and wealthier parts of

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Mexico City to visit Jesucristo’s followers in Iztapalapa. “Ahí fue el lloriquear de mujeres y el lamentarse de los hombres. Llanto, pena, rabia. Unos hablaban hasta de levantarse en armas”

(305). Here, unlike at Jesucristo’s baptism and death, the crying does not interrupt the powerful man’s speech. It unites the community and inspires change. Some of Jesucristo’s female followers look for his body in a public cemetery. There, gravediggers tell the women that the path is going forward, and that Jesucristo has not finished walking it, similar to the way that the narrative voice in Oficio spoke directly to Catalina after Domingo’s death, and reminded her that she was not abandoned (306-7). As in Oficio, which warned of violence before justice, El evangelio implies that following Jesucristo’s path to social change will involve violent struggle

(307). This episode is consistent with Leñero’s interpretation of liberation theology, in which

Jesus became – rather than was – the Son of God (Leñero “La opción” 78-9). The novel, in accordance with these views, confirms Jesucristo’s death through an absent body. The graphic portrayal of Jesucristo’s suffering and death focuses so extensively on the body, that is,

Jesucristo’s blood and injuries, that it reinforces the division between mind and body.

Nevertheless, the novel creates a literary representation of a body image that evokes characters in the novel and in other texts. In my interpretation of the novel, Jesucristo’s body will symbolically connect to the bodies of those he heals.

4.4 Miracles Connect Characters’ Bodies Jesucristo Gómez’s miraculous healings challenge the State, the Church and associated powers. According to Luke’s Gospel, Jesus performed many miracles. He raised people from the dead, cured illnesses and healed the sick. Leñero’s Jesucristo also performs miracles. Still, as

Caufield observes, Jesucristo Gómez “addresses situations on an arbitrary ad hoc basis” (126).

Many miracles are metaphors for social change, based on reason, ingenuity or quick-thinking

186 rather than divine intervention (Schlickers 381). These miracles showcase Jesucristo’s skills and heroics even as they focus on characters’ bodies.

The novel’s representation of miraculously healed bodies becomes a representation of deformed, sick or disabled bodies, which through my reading become a collective body. I suggest that the novel’s emphasis on the characters’ sick, and then healed, bodies, however, does not unravel their individual bodies; rather, it negates them entirely as it creates a collective subject centered on Jesucristo Gómez. By reading these miracles as literary representations of something like Puar’s encounter, which she asserts can “potentially unravel oneself but just as quickly be recuperated through a restabilized self, so that the political transformation is invited,”

I propose that miracles in the novel lead to transformation (“Prognosis Time” 169). These episodes similarly follow Bhabha and Hutcheon’s ideas that creativity arises within confining situations. Through the miracles’ formulaic pattern, I read a collective corporeal experience, much like the collective experience of the Eucharist.

Jesucristo calms violent men on two separate occasions, and through these miracles, the text critiques government corruption, patriarchal structures and Marian devotion. The first,

“Jesús enseña en Cafarnaúm y cura a un endemoniado (4, 31-37),” establishes the miracle pattern: Jesucristo travels to a new part of Mexico, meets someone who needs help, and helps that character by healing their body (62-6). Jesucristo is in Uruapan, in the state of Michoacán, on a Sunday morning eating breakfast in the best comedor, or open-air restaurant, in the market.

As Jesucristo sits down to have breakfast with a local man, a third and obviously drunk man,

Doroteo Arenas, interrupts them. Like Simeón, Doroteo went to jail from time to time; however, whenever Doroteo was arrested, he would not stay for even a week because the governor owed him many favours (64). In the market, Doroteo lunges at Jesucristo with his machete. Confronted by Jesucristo, I suggest that Doroteo coincides with Roberto Buffington’s assertions about

187 masculinity in Mexico: psychic violence against his position leads him to commit physical violence against others (188). Nevertheless, Jesucristo stays still and “acuclillado, continuó con su mirada metida en los ojos de Doroteo,” which so strongly affects the drunk man that he interrupts Jesucristo. “¡A mí nadie me mira así, hijo de tu chingada madre!” (65). Doroteo’s response inadvertently conflates the Virgin Mary and the Malinche, humanizing the venerable religious figure. The emphasis on Doroteo and Jesucristo’s eyes, moreover, reminds us of

Vieira’s argument that blindness leads to a subject’s remaking (3-4). Following this “re-making,” we see that “[c]omo de un volcán, su boca eruptó una masa amarilla que salpicó las ropas de su enemigo y se derramó luego sobre los mantelitos de plástico [del comedor]” (65-6). The novel reduces Doroteo to characteristics that negate his ability to think, act independently or create anything besides violence, which points out that even if a character can gain power by being embedded in the political system, this power is limited. Then, foreshadowing his later death,

Jesucristo rips his shirt and begins to clean Doroteo (66). Jesucristo restores Doroteo to an alternative narrative by going together to the Rodillo del Diablo, a waterfall at the mouth of the

Cupatitzio river in the Mexican state of Michoacán, and allows Doroteo to participate in society again (66). Jesucristo’s choice of destination becomes more significant when we consider local lore. It asserts that at one time, the Cupatitzio river dried up and local people attempted to revive it through a procession in honour of the Virgin. During this procession, an image of the Devil came up out of the earth, saw the face of the Virgin, and fled, and as he fled, the water returned

(“Leyenda de la Rodilla del Diablo”). In other words, in the novel, Jesucristo takes Doroteo, an

“endemoniado,” to a place where he might also see the face of the Virgin, the demons within him would leave, and he would be healed. By demonstrating that any person, even a corrupt criminal, could participate in this spiritual healing and join his alternative narrative, I suggest that the text also forms part of an alternative historical trajectory in Mexico.

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In a similar miracle, “El endemoniado de Gerasa (8:26-38),” Jesucristo reaches out to a condemned man (114-118). This story begins in accordance with the miracle formula: Jesucristo and his disciplines make their way to Nautla, in the state of Veracruz. They see a pig farm with a beautiful pigsty, and the disciples exclaim that these pigs live better than some people (114). The pigsty likely appears beautiful in comparison to the surrounding area, which I assume is populated with people of lower socioeconomic status. Jesucristo knocks over a pile of wooden crates and disturbs a man who was hiding there (115). This man, only described as el mulato, tries to run away, and ends up in the pigsty. The story gives an anonymous man racialized features, open sores and a watery gaze, and places him in a pigpen next to a waste trough, which equates him with unclean animals (117). The novel further dehumanizes him when other characters affirm that el mulato is crazy and has a violent criminal history (115-6). Like the indigenous people in Oficio, el mulato is so close to the dirt that he almost becomes it. “Estaba embarrado de lodo y de excrementos. Se parapetó detrás de la hembra [cerda] y extendió el brazo para apuntar con la pistola a Jesucristo Gómez” (117). The novel strengthens this notion when we consider that the mulato exists as bare life, in a perpetual state of flight, at the margins of society (Agamben 103). Fearing for el mulato’s life, Jesucristo decides to help him by walking towards him and holding his gaze. Jesucristo’s eyes have a slightly different effect on el mulato than they had on Doroteo Arenas. Rather than provoking vomit, Jesucristo’s gaze causes el mulato to shoot Jesucristo (117). After el mulato realizes that he has harmed a helpless man, el mulato tries to help Jesucristo, and then hands himself over to the authorities. He removes himself from the situation of bare life only to be oppressed by the State through its jail. I propose that the miracle formula, the men’s violent tendencies and grotesque appearances establish corporeal interchangeability. Doroteo vomited away his past connections to political corruption, and el mulato shot Jesucristo and turned himself over to the authorities. As I read connections

189 between Doroteo, el mulato and Jesucristo’s dying body, el mulato and Jesucristo may also confront Doroteo’s political connections and the unjust distribution of wealth in Mexico.

El evangelio uses the same formula to present episodes where Jesucristo heals people’s physical illnesses through ingenuity and perseverance, countering its portrayal of the hierarchical medical system. The first healing story takes place in the marginalized community of pepenadores in Iztapalapa, Mexico City. In the private medical clinic where the doctor had refused to treat Pedro Simón’s mother-in-law, Jesucristo attempts to convince the director to authorize an operation, and re-inscribe her into the existing system (68-9). Unlike Jesucristo’s encounters with Doroteo and el mulato, however, neither Jesucristo’s eyes nor his gaze solve the problem. Jesucristo stubbornness and his refusal to leave the clinic convince its director to provide an operation (69-70). The episode continues to follow same miracle pattern when the mother-in-law celebrates being restored to an alternative narrative with a party in Jesucristo’s honour (70). This miracle, and its coughs and shouts, evokes Pedro Simón’s mother-in-law and

Jesucristo’s dying body (67-8), and I thus read a bond between them. Jesucristo’s passivity, moreover, evokes the miracles where Jesucristo healed Doroteo and el mulato. The characters in this episode also challenge the Mexican religious system: in the episode we learn that Pedro

Simón’s wife felt that her only option for curing her mother was to light a candle to the Virgin of

Zapopan, Our Lady of Expectation (67). These inter-episodic connections strengthen my understanding of a collective body in the text, which, were it to follow Jesucristo Gómez, might challenge unjust structures of power in Mexico.

The novel’s next section, “Numerosas curaciones (4, 40-41),” also focuses on the illnesses that grind down individuality among Iztapalapa’s pepenadores (70-2). After the pepenadores learn what Jesucristo Gómez had done for Pedro Simón’s mother-in-law, they seek him out. Jesucristo returns to the clinic that had given Pedro Simón’s mother-in-law an operation

190 and attempts to obtain health insurance for the Iztapalapa community of pepenadores. For about a month and a half, Jesucristo, with the help of the clinic director, goes from office to office in the Department of Social Security and in Cámara de Diputados. As in the previous episode, where he stayed in one place until the director changed his mind, here too, Jesucristo’s stubbornness causes his eventual success (71). In this vignette, moreover, the novel elevates

Mexico’s indigenous heritage as Jesucristo drinks pulque, a drink that ostensibly hearkens back to the Aztecs, with a community leader, Celestino Banderas, whose name means heavenly flags, in a bar called Solomon’s Glories. The paralyzed older people in this episode have convulsions that remind us of Simeón Terrones, their vomit evokes the drunk Doroteo and Jesucristo’s dying body and their eye problems suggest that, like Simeón, they see in a different way. These intratextual connections, in my view, form a collective body that may challenge textual representations of Mexican bureaucracy, its abysmal public health care system, and the unjust distribution of wealth.

The next two miracles I examine depict Jesucristo’s interactions with patriarchal structures that limit women’s opportunities. Jesucristo conforms to the pattern established in previous miracle episodes to heal two women, Genoveva and Remedios, by encouraging them to leave patriarchal structures. The novel portrays Genoveva and Remedios in similar ways, and their bodies evoke other characters’ bodies; I posit that these similar descriptions suggest that they also become part of the intercorporeal resistance developed over the course of the novel.

In “Resurreción del hijo de la viuda de Naím (7, 11-17),” Genoveva lies on her bed and cries for months after her son had died (97-9). In accordance with Díaz Guerrero’s observations about women, she was dominated by her emotions. In a departure from these statements, these emotions affect her body. “[P]arecía un esqueleto: su rostro se había arrugado como un papel apretado en el puno y se sacudía presa de temblorines mientras refería sus desgracias” (97-8).

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Her town perceives her as a “freak show”: others would go to her home to watch her cry. El evangelio focuses so extensively on Genoveva’s grotesque physical appearance that she loses higher functions; even walking has become difficult for her. The town’s doctor concludes that science was not yet able to decipher such a strange sickness and the priest could not appeal to her religious beliefs to cure her (97). She thus calls to mind the Iztapalapa pepenadores, whose illnesses also destroyed their physical appearances, and Genoveva in Revueltas’ “¿Cuánta será la oscuridad?” whose dead son was thrown to her pigs. Jesucristo meets her and immediately realizes that this Genoveva, like Genoveva in Revueltas’ story is not sick; her love of her son made her feel worthless after he died. Jesucristo then scolds Genoveva for squandering her life.

She cries out: “What can I do? I’m a widow, childless, I have no money, only debts” (98).

Jesucristo tells her to change her life and yells at her until she walks stiffly to the store. In so doing, she foreshadows the gravediggers’ instructions to Jesucristo’s followers. I thus suggest that by breaking away from patriarchal family structures, she might inadvertently complete the account of Jesucristo’s resurrection and so Genoveva becomes part of a collective entity that seeks to transform the inactive, inefficient Catholic Church, the self-styled expertise of the medical system and the family structure that reduced her to her physical reality.

“Curación en sábado de la mujer encorvada (13, 10-17)” (176-80), parallels Jesucristo’s treatment of Genoveva. It describes three nuns in Oaxaca who are in charge of taking care of the priest, overseeing the church and praying for missionaries. An older nun, Remedios, is frustrated with her situation, as she feels that after eighteen years of slave labour, she is called to be more than a glorified maid. She struggles with the desire to be a missionary, and finds that by using the cord, which served as a belt for her habit, to flagellate herself she can temper this fervour (177).

The patriarchal Church structure dehumanizes Remedios to such an extent that only violent discipline allows her to remain faithful to the priest and Jesucristo liberates Remedios from its

192 confines. One day, Remedios hears Jesucristo speak at a workers’ rally and faints. Remedios’ physical ailment grabs Jesucristo’s attention and Jesucristo restores her to an alternative narrative. This reminds us of other episodes where Jesucristo physically interrupted religious structures, such as his destruction of liturgical objects during mass in the Lomas, and his argument with a Professor of Moral Theology. Jesucristo then figuratively brings Remedios to life. Jesucristo has supper with her and her fellow nuns, encouraging them to leave this situation, but the priest interrupts them. The priest yells “¡No me insulte!” and Jesucristo calmly replies

“No lo insulto, padre” (180). In this argument, the priest, a representative of the reactionary

Church, implies that by encouraging Remedios to leave the order, Jesucristo has insulted the priest himself. Jesucristo completes his miracle when Remedios founds a new religious community, which points out that the miracle narratives necessarily lead to a communal or collective response.

El evangelio’s episodic structure thus follows Bhabha and Hutcheon and creatively links characters from disparate episodes. People are sick, they come to Jesucristo for help and

Jesucristo heals them with his eyes, in the case of his non-fight with Doroteo Arenas, or by doing something ingenious, like going to meeting after meeting and refusing to leave the government offices until the community received insurance. The characters’ inability to get out bed, self- flagellation, vomit and violence, spill beyond their individual bodies and episodes and, in my interpretation, bind them to each other and to Jesucristo’s life. As the novel describes the characters Jesucristo heals in a similar way to Jesucristo’s birth, baptism, death and resurrection, the miracles link the healed characters to Jesucristo’s life and challenge structures of power in

Mexico. As many miracles end with a celebration, I suggest that through the miracle pattern, these healed characters might take part in this collective resistance.

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The novel represents oppression and corruption in its political, social, intellectual and religious context, in particular, by emphasizing its characters’ bodies. The novel’s form commitment to translating the Gospel of Luke, heading by heading, reminds us of this confining situation, and as such, further evokes the novel’s context. At the same time that the textual emphasis on characters’ bodies is understood as an allusion to oppression in the Mexican context, it can also be seen as a mode of resistance in the text. As I read figures as diverse as the drunk and corrupt Doroteo Arenas and the self-flagellating nun Remedios alongside of one another, the intratextual becomes the intercorporeal, and they become a collective subject. In my analysis, as these individual characters become a collective, they evoke Puar’s description of the assemblage, which is simultaneously self-annihilating and transformative. In El evangelio, this transformation falls in line with Jesucristo Gómez’s collective project, which is loosely aligned with liberation theology and the Second Vatican Council’s emphasis on participation in Catholic rituals, in particular, the mass. I read Jesucristo’s body as analogous to the host in the Eucharist that becomes Jesus’ body, and suggest that it becomes Puar’s meeting place. Jesucristo’s humanity, which the text highlights through its portrayal of his body, reminds us of the characters he heals, and thus we see that they collectively confront the ejido system, intellectual circles, medical segregation, government corruption and bureaucracy and the reactionary

Catholic Church.

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Conclusion Aparta de mí este cáliz and Crónicas of the Mexico City Subway

Revueltas, Rulfo, Castellanos and Leñero’s portrayals of rural Mexico suggest that the land relates to characters’ religion, language and family structures. Their novels and short stories illustrate that these entities have struggled with one another and with the Mexican government over the course of the 20th century. Other parts of Leñero’s novel and Revueltas’ short story “El hijo tonto” represent an urban context, and we see how urban landscapes similarly shape characters’ experiences. The dissertation has described these power struggles in the Mexican context using Foucauldian and Althusserian understandings of power. Foucault’s framework illustrates how power is acted upon through individuals and institutions, and Althusser’s allows us to conceive of power as divided between specific groups. Williams’ analysis, which brings these theories to bear on Mexican modernity (1920-1982) and literary texts, also shapes the dissertation. For Williams, the Mexican State is a conglomeration of powerful entities, such as the landownership system and the government, that influences Mexican people through its

“police,” that is, anyone who would act on its behalf. In this interpretation, Mexican people also act as police towards one another and participate in their own subjection. Characters in the texts in this dissertation, representations of Mexican people, largely coincide with Williams’ view. We have seen how weaker characters voluntarily and involuntarily subordinate themselves to more powerful characters in a novel or short story. At the same time, my analysis has maintained a separation between powerful entities when it was reflected by the literary texts, and has

195 identified the government, intellectuals, the medical system, the Catholic Church and the family as significant powers in this context.

I have also sustained that the Mexican government, regardless of its intentions, has never been able to control its entire country or population. In Revueltas, Rulfo, Castellanos and

Leñero’s novels and short stories, representatives the State try and are unable to control education, medicine, family structure, landownership systems and the Catholic Church. Although the government controls the army and the police, for instance, its state apparatus of education is unable to send teachers to rural areas without exposing them to harsh punishments similar to what we see in “Dios en la tierra.”

In the 1940s, as the PRM became the PRI, the Mexican government attempted to consolidate power throughout Mexico by developing institutions that would refer to specific sectors of the population, such at the CTM for Mexican wage-labourers. Moreover, while in a scheme like Althusser’s, the private sphere would carry out the State’s goals, in Mexico this process was fraught at best. In the 1930s and 1940s, which we examined in relation to characters’ bodies in Revueltas and Rulfo’s stories, the government sought to appropriate maternal symbolism from the Church. Yet in spite of government-sponsored Mother’s Day celebrations and daycares, the Virgin of Guadalupe remains the pre-eminent maternal figure in contemporary Mexico. Moreover, although the State has been officially involved in agrarian reform since the Mexican Revolution, and re-invigorated its efforts under presidents Lázaro

Cárdenas (1934-40) and Adolfo López Mateos (1958-1964), as we saw in Rulfo, Castellanos and

Leñero’s texts, the Mexican government has been unable to confront landownership patterns in rural Mexico and the ejido system is widely acknowledged to be corrupt. Similarly, the Mexican

State has found it difficult to establish itself as secular. In spite of its teachers, soldiers and bureaucrats, Catholic churches regularly display the colours of the Mexican flag and public

196 concerts are held in public squares, which, continuing in the colonial pattern, are wedged in between Cathedrals and government buildings.

As I have argued, this constant power struggle leaves indelible marks on characters’ bodies. I have read intertextual connections between characters and instances where characters come together as metaphorical assemblages that might point to social change. To do so, I use

Puar’s notion of the assemblage as a confining and liberating space. Rulfo’s characters, for instance, face the desolate “llano,” but manage to bring new life to it, through experiences like the figurative birth of a chicken in “Nos han dado la tierra,” and an oozing, opening, pilgrimage in “Talpa.” I proposed that Castellanos’ text presents a multiple constellation of maternal relationships that relate to an ironic re-interpretation of the Passion Play and that Leñero’s novel gives a plausible example of a 20th century Messiah and resistance movement.

The More Things Change: Aparta de mí este cáliz

In the period these texts were written (1940-1980), Mexico ostensibly became a modern, urban and industrialized country and experienced somewhat stable economic development. Luis

Humberto Crosthwaite’s novel Aparta de mí este cáliz (2009) follows in Leñero’s footsteps and re-imagines the life of Jesus Christ in a changed context. Published several decades later than the other texts examined in this dissertation, Crosthwaite’s novel presents images of a collective body, that, as I show in the brief analysis that follows, similarly illustrate oppression and transformation.94

94 This title alludes to Jesus’ words in the New Testament Gospels and to César Vallejo’s poem “España aparta de mí este cáliz.” Unless otherwise state, all parenthetical citations in the conclusion refer to Luis Humberto Crosthwaite, Aparta de mí este cáliz (Barcelona: Tusquets, 2009).

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When Crosthwaite’s novel appeared, the “Mexican Miracle” (1940-1968) had definitively ended. As Óscar Zapata states in his personal reflection on the period between 1984 and 2012, since his birth in 1984, Mexico has experienced nothing but crisis (14-15). It began with the economic crisis in 1982, which was spurred by the decline in international oil prices that led

Mexico to default on international loan payments. Then, an earthquake in Mexico City in 1985 left the city reeling. This was followed by greater US intervention in the form of IMF loans and the 1993 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), and an even worse economic crisis in 1994. Today, the Mexican government experiences greater involvement from the private sector and higher levels of US intervention than it had during the period considered in the dissertation, although its corruption and bureaucracy remain constant. At the same time, the government has perpetuated an insular intellectual realm by creating more institutions. In 1988, it created the Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las artes (CONACULTA); one year later, in

1989, it developed the Fondo nacional para la cultura y las artes (Fonca) scholarship system

(Agustín Tragicomedia 3 215-7). According to Emily Hind, intellectuals supported by these systems may resent those who experience commercial success (191-2). In the political realm, opposition to government corruption and US intervention grew. After NAFTA was implemented in 1994, the Zapatista rebellion in Chiapas caught the attention of the international community.

The leftist movement also presented Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas, son of former president Lázaro

Cárdenas, and Andrés Manuel López Obrador as candidates in the 1988 and 2006 presidential elections. Both candidates lost, amidst huge allegations of electoral fraud.95 Today, the country,

95 For more information about this time period, see Agustín’s Tragicomedia mexicana 3: la vida en México entre 1982 y 1994, and the chapter “El desvanecimento del milagro” in A la sombra de la Revolución Mexicana (237- 291).

198 in particular Northern border regions and coastal cities, experiences high levels of violence related to drug trafficking.96

Crosthwaite’s text reflects the border region and may also allude to violence in port cities.

It situates Jesus, who, in this violent context, would have been an old man at 33, in 1st century

Canaan on the edge of the Sea of Galilee and a barrio popular (low-income neighbourhood) in

20th or 21st century Mexico. According to reviewer Ricardo Pliego, the novel takes place “un no- lugar que sin embargo muestra las cicatrices inequívocas que produce la nueva violencia mexicana” (96). Aparta de mí employs violent and sacrilegious imagery, which points to the ongoing influence of religion in Mexico. For instance, the novel opens as the narrative voice speaks to an unnamed audience. The narrator tells this audience that he dreamt he was Jesus, and that he was kissing someone. “Era un Cristo enamorado, un Cristo feliz” (11). This Jesus enjoyed kissing a partner and had problems with the crucifixion: “me parecía sumamente grotesca, además de dolorosa. Pensaba que era un asunto superable, que se podía reemplazar con algún otro acto menos (cómo decirlo) ¿complicado?” (13-14). He would relive Jesus’ life in his own way.

Aparta de mí also relates to changes that have taken place in Mexico. It reflects greater urbanization, commercialization and US involvement. For instance, “[l]as calles están pavimentadas, con semáforos en las esquinas. Adiós a la vieja terracería que empolvaba todo lo que estaba alrededor” (17). The nationally based Oxxo convenience store chain, a sign of increased commercialization, has replaced a locally owned “licorería de don Moisés” (25). The

Romans and el Hermano in the novel allude to the Roman Empire and Herod in the biblical text

96 For further information on border violence and the drug trade see for example Domínguez Ruvalcaba’s “Ciudad Juárez: la vida breve.”

199 and to Big Brother, contemporary US intervention. According to the Romans, the Mexican characters in the novel are “muy traviesos, no pueden estar en paz. Son salvajes. Necesitan una mano dura que los guíe, que les enseñe a ser dóciles ante el conquistador. No entienden, hay que doblegarlos” (52). These powerful Romans, who act in conjunction with commercial and urban interests, subjugate characters in the novel.

In addition to alluding to a changing context that includes urbanization, commercialization and US intervention, the novel presents a different type of family structure and intellectual system. Indeed, in Aparta de mí, absent maternal figures suggest that traditional

Mexican family structure is no longer present. The narrative voice tells us that “[m]i mamá ha desaparecido, hace muchos años que mi mamá desapareció” (17). This alludes to widespread violence against women in Ciudad Juárez, and to the countless women who migrate to the US in search of work and leave their children to be cared for by other family members.97 Intellectuals in the novel also reflect a new arrangement. Although the Mexican government had created new cultural institutions and scholarships in the late 1980s, by 2009, these institutions faced increasing commercial interests. Aparta de mí presents us with an author who comes to the character Jesus with writer’s block and tells Jesus that he feels guilty for having spent his advance without writing anything (67). This commercially based structure, just like the governmentally-based structures examined in relation to earlier works, strongly affects the author character’s body. He tells Jesus that: “me hundí en la pobreza para buscar ahí mi creatividad.

Intenté volverme alcohólico, pero ni eso me funcionó bien. Dejé a mi esposa y a mis hijos, vendí

97 For more information about violence against women in Ciudad Juárez see Kathleen Staudt and Howard Cambell’s “The Other Side of the Ciudad Juárez Femicide Story” or Alicia Gaspar de Alba and Georgina Guzmán’s edited collection Making a Killing: Femicide, Free Trade, and la Frontera.

200 drogas, participé en delito” (68). The writer character participates in his subjection to commercial interests and the destruction of his family. Thus, Aparta de mí reflects a political context marked by US influence, commercial interests, migration, violence and drugs, rather than the political, economic and intellectual modernization through institution building that we saw in earlier chapters.

At the same time, representatives of commercial interests, US intervention and religious figures, like the representatives of the institutions we saw earlier, reduce other characters to bare life. Crosthwaite’s Messiah, for instance, reflects on those who visit him: “[l]a gente que se acerca, mis fieles seguidores, me quieren matar, pero de aburrimiento. Vienen a contarme sus penas, sus problemas personales” (41). This religious figure lumps his followers together through their problems with their families, their jobs and the Romans. On other occasions, Crosthwaite’s

Jesus performs miracles without a specific plan or method. “En mis buenos días, los ciegos ven y los inválidos caminan. En mis malos días, nadie ve ni camina” (59). The followers blend together and all those who are not the narrator or Jesus-figure are reduced to their blindness or their inability to walk. I argue that as these characters acquire one another’s likeness, they remind us of oppression in their context.

As these characters become interchangeable with one another based on their problems and physical features, we can read them as an assemblage. Crosthwaite’s Jesus sees them as a multitude “que se está reuniendo” (136). This meeting includes “[h]ombres maduros y ancianos, amas de casa, estudiantes, burócratas, ejecutivos, obreros y campesinos” (136). In other words, each sector of Mexican society meets other sectors. This encounter, like Puar’s conviviality, may have the potential to imagine something beyond their separation and difference and, in their all too similar personal problems, blindness and inability to walk, they could find a place to

201 encounter one another. Jesus in the novel might serve as this meeting-place. In a re-imagined crucifixion, Jesus tells us that he is:

en el centro de dos hombres que van cayendo. Veo que uno de ellos intenta decirme algo

pero no logra controlar el impulso del descenso y se aleja de mí. Descubro que si

extiendo los brazos es posible planear y pronto entiendo la dinámica del vuelo. Soy un

experto piloto. Un brazo más abajo que el otro, un movimiento de la cadera hacia la

izquierda y fácilmente me acerco al hombre. Le tomo la mano, nos acercamos. (60)

In a flying crucifixion, Jesus’ body, in particular, his arms and hands, becomes a bridge that connects the three men to one another; like the mass “que se está reuniendo,” they imagine something other than they might have hoped for, in the case of the three flying men, beyond their impending death.

The protagonist in Aparta de mí envisions more than simply connecting people to one another to avoid death. Crosthwaite’s Jesus wants to lead a resistance movement, that takes the energy of the mass and channels it somewhere he considers productive. As he states, “[u]rge una revuelta, se necesita enfrentar a la dictadura, darle al César lo que es del César y dárselo con furia” (54). Towards the end of the novel, this movement acquires festive overtones. Just like festivals that honour saints throughout Mexico:

[l]as señoras han abierto sus casas a los peregrinos ofreciendo tamales calientes y pozole.

Sale música de las casas. Surgen aromas a flores y pan recién horneado. Vendedores

ofrecen churros, hot dogs y figurinas de mí [Jesús] y de los apóstoles. (136) 98

98 Octavio Paz describes the Mexican penchant for festivals in “Todos santos, día de muertos” in El laberinto de la soledad.

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Crosthwaite’s Jesus becomes a saint who creates a celebratory religious movement, and all who participate are invited to confront Caesar, that is, the US and commercial interests.

The More They Stay the Same: The Urban Landscape and Crónicas of the Mexico City Subway

As I ride the Mexico City subway on my way to finishing the dissertation, I think about how Aparta de mí ese cáliz and the violence I hear about on the news relate to the urban experience in Mexico City. Over the course of the 20th century, Mexico City became the country’s modern, urban centre. Although authors like Revueltas, Rulfo and Castellanos deal with rural areas in their work, they, like Leñero, were based in Mexico City; Crosthwaite reflects a more recent intellectual trend and lives and works in the US. The impact of the shift towards

Mexico City over the course of the 20th century cannot be overstated. Indeed, according to cronista Carlos Monsiváis, the desmadre (fucking mess) so characteristic of Mexico City is a chaos that would have been inconceivable in the agrarian universe (Monsiváis Apocalipstick

31).99 It is as if the urban landscape has its own bizarre natural power that impacts the daily lives of Mexican people.

I turn to Monsiváis to shed light on the urban landscape, because as critic Tanius Karam has observed, Monsiváis epitomized Mexico’s City’s urban, intellectual experience:

no era infrecuente toparse con Monsiváis en alguna estación de metro, en el Sanborns en

la plaza central de Coyoacán, en la librería Gandhi de la Avenida Miguel Ángel de

Quevedo, en la venta nocturna en alguna librería “Octavio Paz” del Fondo de Cultura

99 I use Hind’s translation of desmadre. For further analysis of the term see Hind 76.

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Económica, o caminando por cualquier calle, en alguna cafetería en las inmediaciones de

la [colonia] Portales desayunando con algún periodista. (46)

As Monsiváis visited bookstores, restaurants and stores in Mexico City, he would have been a figure familiar to some of the city’s residents. In addition to frequenting these cultural landmarks, Monsiváis regularly used the subway, the epitome of the Mexico City experience.

Monsiváis chronicles the subway in “La hora del transporte. El Metro: viaje hacia el fin del apretujón” and “Sobre el Metro las Coronas” in Los rituales del caos (2001) and “Sobre el Metro las Coronas” in Apocalipstick (2009).100 Ricardo Garibay also situates the Mexico City subway in “Viaje al centro del mundo” (1976).101 In both versions of “Sobre el Metro las Coronas,”

Monsiváis states that the subway is the city:

El Metro es la Ciudad…casi al pie de la letra. Es la vida de todos atrapada en una sola

gran vertiente, es la riqueza fisonómica, es el extravío en el laberinto de las emociones

suprimidas o emitidas como descargas viscerales. Y es el horizonte de las profesiones y

los oficios, de las orientaciones y las desorientaciones, de los empleos y los subempleos y

los desempleos. Y es la Ciudad más palpable. (Los rituales del caos 177; Apocalipstick

241)

On the subway, each person becomes a voyeur who notices that each person is the same. Instead of gazing with horror at the appearances of others, people begin to substitute the “What would they say?” for “They won’t have seen it. They are just like me” (Apocalipstick 231).

100 Further information about the history of the Mexico City subway system can be found in Bernardo Navarro Benítez’s article. 101 I would like to thank Sara Potter for sharing an unpublished paper on chroniclers of the metro.

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As I enter the subway system, ask at the ticket booth for the metro card that is “always on its way” and inevitably pay three pesos for a ticket, I become convinced that the collective body, pointing towards oppression and resistance, emerges in this underground city. The metro is an excellent place to see masses of Mexicans going about their daily life. As I observe my fellow subway riders, I am reminded of Garibay’s “Viaje al centro de la ciudad.” To write his report,

Garibay spent six hours a day in various metro stations for five days. After five days, Garibay concluded that the passenger would leave the metro “espantado de lo que ha vivido allí abajo y agradecido por emerger más o menos sano y salvo: milagro de sol a sol y de lunes a lunes para un millón y medio de personas en esta inhabitable ciudad” (146). Almost twenty years later, the metro system had expanded, but not kept up with population growth. In the first edition of “La hora del transporte” in 1995, and again in 2001, Monsiváis noted that in the subway, borders between bodies evaporate (Los rituales del caos 113).

Rush hour in the Mexico City subway is nothing to be scoffed at. On February 19, 2013, the Facebook anti-fan page “Sistema de Transporte Colectivo Metro (Página No Oficial)” reminded us that “[d]os cuerpos no pueden ocupar el mismo lugar al mismo tiempo. Excepto claro en nuestro metro donde las leyes de la física no aplican. Nunca han existido. Ni existirán.”

In October, it posted a picture that reflected how the subway system seems to overcome the laws of physics. The page displayed a picture of the crowds seen at terminal stations every morning.

These stations, such as Observatorio and Pantitlán, connect populous areas, via bus and combi minivans, to the subway system. The caption to this photograph asks a question: “Metro, where can I find the love of my life?” The Metro answers, “I am not sure. Maybe at the Observatorio station on Monday morning at 7:45 AM” (9 Oct. 2012). Although this crowd may have individual features, and maybe even include the love of one’s life, as the individuals become a multitude, they are indistinguishable from one another.

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The State is ostensibly in charge of this venture. As a result:

En el Metro, los usuarios y las legiones que los usuarios contienen (cada persona

engendrará un vagón) reciben la herencia de corrupción institucionalizada, devastación

ecológica y supresión de los derechos básicos y, sin desviar la inercia del legado, lo

vivifican a su manera. (Monsiváis Los rituales de caos 111)

To exert control over the masses, the State upholds patriarchal structures, and uses police officers and enthusiastic young people to create a sense of order. During rush hour, for instance, university-age students in orange shirts that proclaim their love of DF (Mexico City, Federal

District) tell people to shove their way onto the train in an orderly way. Mexico City has also decided, in order to address ongoing complaints about sexual assault, to reserve two cars for women in peak hours, and has designed a series of bright pink buses for the same purpose

(Hernández 20; Rodgers and Seelhoff 8). Women and many men conform to this division; those men who elect not to obey posted rules and enter the women’s car ignore voiced and unvoiced discomfort.102 Men do, however, respond to police who forcibly prevent them from entering these subway cars. In this “safe” space, which reminds us of Idolina’s room in Oficio de tinieblas, women regularly put on make-up, curl their eyelashes and pluck their eyebrows. On occasion, they even perform these rituals outside of the women’s car and subvert the expectation that to be a woman means being effortlessly beautiful.

Commercial interests, which we saw in Crosthwaite’s novel, also enter these subway cars. Vendors continually interrupt commuter silence almost as if they were a live commercial.

102 It has also been reported that men have disguised themselves as women with the explicit intent of entering the women’s car to assaulting them (Hernández 20).

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Someone, or perhaps many people, purchases specific articles at a major warehouse or market in

Mexico City and arranges for them to be sold in the metro. One week, several sellers on different lines told me I could have the same cell-phone cover for ten pesos. Another week, it was miniature toothbrushes and toothpaste. The sellers submit to a capitalist system to earn a living through a job that precludes the opportunity for individual, autonomous speech. When the

Facebook anti-fan page alerted fans to a coffee mug bearing a map of the Mexico City subway system was being sold at the Sanborn’s department store, it mimicked these sellers’ verbal

“formula”:

Mire caballero, damita, niño, niña, quimera, mascota, seres de otro mundo, le traigo a la

venta el bonito vaso oficial del STC [Sistema de Transporte Colectivo] Metro para que

nunca se pierda al beber su café con piquete, o bien su rica agua de pepino con un toque

de hierbabuena y limón, su té para calmar los nervios o lo que usted más guste. 10 pesitos

le vale, 10 pesitos le cuesta. (19 Oct 2012)

Blind people, or people with other disabilities, like these sellers, submit to commercial interests and seem to specialize in selling music on the subway. Wearing old backpacks, with a spot cut out for speakers, they share disco, cumbia or ranchera music at the loudest volumes one could ever imagine. The vendors wait in line at terminal stations, to ensure that only one person is selling a specific kind of music, per subway car, per stop. There are also independent musicians who play on the subway, and glass-breakers who voluntarily throw themselves on cut glass on the subway floor. The latter group, like the vendors, uses the exact same words to the passengers

207 in each subway car, but, unlike the vendors, it seems to be a speech they have come up with themselves.103

In addition to demonstrating the effects of ongoing commercialization, the Mexico City subway provides us with a fascinating example of the ongoing relationship between Church and

State in Mexico. Again, the Facebook anti-fan page provides an illustrative anecdote, the parable of the good subway user: “Queridos hermanos, en verdad os digo que si hemos de caber todos en el cielo, lo haremos también en un vagón del metro” Guerrero 7:30 (19 Oct. 2012). By mimicking the structure of the biblical parable that states that it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of the needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven (Matt. 19:24,

Mark 10:25, Luke 18:25), and ending with the name of a subway station instead of a gospel, the

Facebook page suggests that religion continues to be a significant force in Mexico.

A leak in the Hidalgo subway station confirms this suggestion. In June 1997, when the leak had not been fixed for some time, people decided that it had acquired the appearance of the

Virgin and began to worship at the image. Eventually, the cement was taken out of the subway station and, with the Church’s blessing and the City’s expense, is now a popular shrine (Almarez and Núñez 8; Valasis 3).104 On a recent Monday afternoon visit, the shrine, at an exit of the

Hidalgo subway station just outside of the San Hipólito Catholic Church, was full of flowers and candles. This shrine’s location further cements the conflicted relationship between Church and

State in Mexico: the subway station’s name calls to mind the instigator of Mexican

103 Monsiváis briefly describes these glass-breakers in Apocalipstick (236). 104 The shrine is at once inside of the Church’s authority, and outside of it – it is literally just outside of the Templo de San Hipólito Catholic Church. Metro administrators, the National Institute for Fine Arts and the Church were involved in preparing the ceremony that inaugurated the shrine (Gamboni 123).

208 independence, the priest Miguel Hidalgo, and the image of the Virgin recalls the symbol of

Mexican-ness par excellence, the Virgin of Guadalupe.105

This shrine may also point to the desire of the more conservative branch of the Catholic

Church to overpower the enormously popular shrine to San Judas Taddeo inside the San Hipólito

Church. San Judas, the patron saint of desperate causes has an enormous following in Mexico.

On his saint’s day, October 28, and on the 28th day of every other month, the subway is packed with people on their way to San Hipólito. In this regard, Monsiváis observed that:

Los judastadeístas enseñan sus esculturitas, las muestran como un trofeo de piedad, se

enorgullecen de sentirse desvalidos porque son tantos que al Santo no le va a quedar otro

remedio que hacerles caso… Y los judastadeístas hacen del Metro su capilla ardiente y

sofocante, allí mueren y resucitan las esperanzas, resucita el fervor… La fe no disminuye

por el número de estaciones, ni nadie puede burlarse de las rogativas, porque todos

andamos en lo mismo. (Apocalipstick 245)

San Judas and the shrine to the Virgin that appeared in a water leak encompass those Mexicans that ride the subway and illustrate the ongoing if contentious influence of religious figures in

Mexico.

Like the characters’ bodies in Revueltas, Rulfo, Castellanos and Leñero’s texts, this contemporary intersection of Church, State, commercial interests and popular mass allows us to

105 Searching the catalogue system is revealing: there are more articles on the Virgin del Metro than the subway system itself. It is also important to note that the Hidalgo subway station is not unique in referring to an historical figure; most subway stations in Mexico City refer to events, places, ideas or people, and include stations such as Consitución de 1917, Coyoacán, La Raza, and Zapata.

209 reflect on the ongoing nature of oppression and the possibility of change. In accordance with

Foucault, on the subway, some people act with power over others and others are subject to it.

The music that destroys any fleeing sense of calm subjugates all subway passengers, but they can exert some measure of power by calling the vendor with a hand full of change. This power, following an Althusserian scheme, is divided up into various entities: commercial interests, the government, Catholic religious figures and patriarchal structures. If we employ Puar’s vocabulary and read an assemblage onto the mass, we realize that the metro annihilates any sense of individuality. After all, the women tweeze their eyebrows in a similar style, and the various sellers and performers say practically the same thing. The passengers all pay the same amount, hear the same terrible music, occasionally buy ten peso chocolate bars that don’t in fact have any chocolate in them, and all, eventually, visit the same shrines. At the same time, if we continue to use Puar’s language, as people participate in their own subjugation to religious, commercial, governmental and patriarchal expectations, they can be seen as meeting one another. Although, perhaps, like the inopportune moment when we find ourselves a bit too close to that couple sharing an apple in a public display of affection, or when the subway stops just a moment too soon and we crash against our neighbours, this meeting is more surprising and uncomfortable that we might have hoped for.

210

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