AFTER THE EARTHQUAKE: LITERARY RESPONSES TO CATASTROPHE IN MEXICO CITY, 1985-2000 BY JULIA GARNER-PRAZERES B.A., BOWDOIN COLLEGE, 2001 M.A., BROWN UNIVERSITY, 2003 A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN THE DEPARTMENT OF HISPANIC STUDIES AT BROWN UNIVERSITY PROVIDENCE, RHODE ISLAND JANUARY 2012 © Copyright 2012 by Julia Garner-Prazeres This dissertation is accepted in its present form by the Department of Hispanic Studies as satisfying the dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Date________________________ _________________________________________ Julio Ortega, Advisor Recommended to the Graduate Council Date________________________ _______________________________________ Aldo Mazzucchelli, Reader Date________________________ _________________________________________ Beatriz Pastor, Reader Approved by the Graduate Council Date________________________ _________________________________________ Peter M. Weber, Dean of the Graduate School iii CURRICULUM VITAE Julia Garner-Prazeres was born in 1979 in Chicago, Illinois. She graduated summa cum laude from Bowdoin College in 2001 with a B.A. in Spanish and French. She received her M.A. in Hispanic Studies at Brown University in 2003. As a graduate student in the Hispanic Studies Department she was awarded the Kossoff Prize for Leadership in Teaching. She is currently a Lecturer at the University of Virginia-Charlottesville where she teaches courses in contemporary Latin American literature. iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to express my deep gratitude to my advisor, Julio Ortega, for his suggestions and guidance throughout this process. A special thanks goes to the members of my committee, Aldo Mazzucchelli and Beatriz Pastor, for their generous participation. I am grateful to the professors in the Hispanic Studies Department for their support and inspiration throughout my graduate studies. I would also like to thank my parents and Luca for their patience and encouragement over the years. v TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION………………………………………………………………...……1 I.1. Landscapes of Catastrophe I.2. Journalism and the Testimonial I.3. Science Fiction Time I.4. Mexican Disaster Fiction I.5. The Novels CHAPTER 1 Conquest, Catastrophe and Civil Society: Alternative Structures of Time in Carlos Fuentes’s Cristóbal Nonato……………………………………………………………32 1.1. The 1985 earthquake and its Impact 1.2. Cristóbal Nonato: Real and Imagined Catastrophes 1.3 Alternative Structures of Time 1.3.1. Popular Culture and the Cycles of Carnival 1.3.2. The Moment of the Earthquake 1.3.3. Apocalypse Then and Now 1.3.4. The Spiral of Open-Ended Struggle 1.4. Carlos Fuentes: Novelist and Social Critic CHAPTER 2 The Ruins of Modernization: Collapsing Structures in Ignacio Solares’s Casas de encantamiento………………………………………………………………77 2.1. The Deep City and the City of the Planners 2.2. Time Travel: A Critical Look at The Past 2.3. Tlatelolco and the Layers of History 2.4. Writing Crisis CHAPTER 3 Environmental Disasters and the Myth of the Five Suns in Two Novels by Homero Aridjis………………………………………………………………………..112 3.1. The Crises of the Nineties 3.2. Disaster Fiction and the Future of Mexico City 3.3. Contemporary Science Fiction and a Rehallucinated Past 3.4. Representation and Redemption vi CHAPTER 4 Disjuncture and Disaster: Past, Present and Future in Carmen Boullosa’s Cielos de la Tierra……………………………………………………………………149 4.1. Alienating Narratives 4.2. Present: Family History and Mestizaje 4.3. Past: The Failed Franciscan Project 4.4. Translation 4.5. Future: Dis-re-memberment in Atlántide 4.6. The Politics of Form CONCLUSION………………………………………………………………………...190 BIBLIOGRAPHY………………………………………………………………………201 vii INTRODUCTION In my dissertation I study science fiction representations1 of catastrophe in Mexican novels published after the 1985 earthquake through the upheaval of the nineties to show how these representations, with their deconstruction of temporality, permit a critical perspective on the present conditions of Mexican society and politics. My dissertation focuses on the fantastical conjoining of distinct temporalities and the fragmented narrative structures of novels of catastrophe by Carlos Fuentes, Ignacio Solares, Homero Aridjis and Carmen Boullosa. These Mexican novels of catastrophe fit within the conceptual framework of contemporary science fiction, and two theorists of the genre, Jean Baudrillard and Frederic Jameson, have provided support for my line of analysis. I examine the way science fiction time in these novels creates connections between historical periods through time travel, dystopian futurescapes, alternative realities that issue forth from a single moment of time, and historical or mythical elements that are de-contextualized. Since they are not constrained by the relationship of cause and effect, these works resemble the free associations of the imaginary of Mexico City as the site of catastrophe and they draw on Mexico’s unique template for disaster through myth and the conquest. In contrast to the testimonial and journalistic accounts of disaster, these novels exaggerate reality and weave together the “before” and “after” of a present catastrophe to compel the reader to think about whether Mexico’s trajectory could have been otherwise. 1 I am not referring here to the genre of science fiction in its narrowest sense, as a literature that explores the impact of science on society, but instead to a broader body of speculative writing that frees the play of time. 1 I.1. Landscapes of Catastrophe At 7:19am on the morning of September 19, 1985 an earthquake measuring 7.8 on the Richter scale devastated Mexico City’s downtown just as many capitalinos were commuting to work and school. Estimates of the fatalities range between 5,000 and 20,0002, and the property and infrastructural damage in the areas in and around the Zócalo is calculated at $4 billion (Gilbert 579). In the worst affected areas entire buildings collapsed, trapping residents, dead and alive, in the rubble. Popular opinion maintained that President de la Madrid’s government was not only slow to respond but also negligent and even abusive in its handling of the crisis. While the authorities delayed rescue operations and in some cases even impeded access to the disaster zones, residents and volunteers spontaneously organized rescue brigades to pull people out of the ruins and provide food and shelter for the victims. Despite the tragic nature of the event, this moment has been hailed as the emergence of civil society in Mexico3. Abandoned by the government for the crucial first couple of days, citizens demonstrated an outpouring of solidarity and a spirit of collaboration and initiative in the immediate aftermath of the catastrophe that were unprecedented in the city’s history. At the same time that this catastrophe represents a watershed in Mexican history because it significantly strengthened civil society, it brought to light the failures of the priista state and the single-party system that had governed the country for nearly all of the twentieth century. The earthquake revealed cases of corruption in contracting, a 2 Estimates range from under 5,000 to 20,000, with 10,000 being the most commonly accepted figure. See Sergio Puente’s article “Social vulnerability to disasters in Mexico City: An assessment method” in Crucibles of Hazard: Mega-Cities and Disasters in Transition (306); and Alan Gilbert’s The Latin American City (139). 3 This view is held by the renowned social critic Carlos Monsiváis (No sin nosotros 9). 2 disregard for construction codes, the terrible state of disrepair of some government buildings, and unsafe factory conditions4, all of which exacerbated the damage and loss of life wreaked by the natural disaster. The victims were largely working-class people, who the party had an ideological commitment to and who were supposed to be the main beneficiaries of the policies of the PRI. The mismanagement of the 1985 earthquake exposed the flaws and unfulfilled promises of the priista government and deepened the disillusionment that began with the massacre of student protestors at Tlatelolco in 1968; it confirmed doubts about the state’s capacity to guarantee a democratic system that would raise the well-being of poorer sectors. After the earthquake, disappointment in the government’s ability to deliver an equitable and just society continued through the late eighties and nineties with a prolonged crisis that shook the foundations of modern Mexico. This turbulent political, social and economic period began with the contested presidential elections of 1988 in which Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas lost to the PRI’s candidate, Carlos Salinas de Gortari in what were widely believed to be fraudulent and fixed elections. In the next decade Salinas implemented a series of neoliberal economic policies, such as the privatization of state-owned banks and companies as well as the signing of the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1992. Salinas greatly reduced social welfare programs and repealed the ejido system of communally-owned farmland that had been in existence since the Mexican Revolution. In the impoverished state of Chiapas, on January 1, 1994 the 4 The earthquake uncovered the dangerous and exploitative labor conditions in the garment industry in the city’s downtown. After the earthquake, bribes were paid to government officials that allowed the clothing manufacturers to extract their machinery from the factories, in some cases before their employees