Re-Reading Elena Garro's Los Recuerdos Del Porvenir in the Time of Ayotzinapa

Re-reading Elena Garro's Los recuerdos del porvenir in the Time of Ayotzinapa

Margo Echenberg

Mexican Studies, Volume 34, Number 1, Winter 2018, pp. 63-88 (Article)

Published by University of California Press

For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/737688

[ This content has been declared free to read by the pubisher during the COVID-19 pandemic. ] Re-reading Elena Garro’s Los recuerdos del porvenir in the Time of Ayotzinapa

Margo Echenberg Tecnologico´ de Monterrey

This essay explores the possibilities of interpreting the forced disappearance of the 43 students from the Escuela Normal in Ayotzinapa, Guerrero, through the literary lens of Los recuerdos del porvenir by Elena Garro. The social fragmentation of the fictional town proves crucial to understanding how structural, cultural, and direct violence determine notions of memory, silence, insurrection, and impunity in the novel. Given that many of the underlying conflicts depicted through the fictional writing are still present in everyday life in Guerrero today, they can illuminate key aspects of both the crimes depicted in the novel and those perpetrated in Iguala in 2014, thereby shedding light on how literary texts provide insights into the edifice and machinations of violence.

Key words: Ayotzinapa, Elena Garro, Los recuerdos del porvenir, memory, social fragmentation, violence.

El presente ensayo contempla la desaparicion´ forzada de los 43 estudiantes de la Escuela Normal en Ayotzinapa, Guerrero, por medio del prisma de la literatura. La fragmentacion´ social del pueblo ficticio de Los recuerdos del porvenir de Elena Garro pone de manifiesto como´ juntos, la violencia estructural, la violencia cultural y la violencia directa determinan las nociones de memoria, silencio, insurreccion´ e impunidad en la novela. Dado que algunos de los conflictos sociales que subyacen en la ficcion´ literaria siguen presentes hoy en Guerrero, estos nos iluminan no solo´ sobre los cr´ımenes retratados en la novela, sino tambien´ sobre aquellos cometidos en Iguala en 2014. De este modo se evidencia de que´ manera los textos literarios pueden esclarecer sobre las estructuras y la maquinacion´ de la violencia.

Palabras clave: Ayotzinapa, Elena Garro, fragmentacion´ social, Los recuerdos del porvenir, memoria, violencia.

Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos Vol. 34, Issue 1, Winter 2018, pages 63–88. issn 0742-9797, electronic issn 1533-8320. ©2018 by The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Reprints and Permissions web page, http://www.ucpress.edu/ journals.php?p¼reprints. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1525/msem.2018.34.1.63. 63 64 Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos

Despite Elena Garro’s marginalized status in terms of the all-male literary grouping of writers and novels known as Latin America’s ‘‘Boom,’’ her rendering of history and memory in Los recuerdos del porvenir (1963), paired with its controversial female protagonists, experimental narrative style, and use of the notion of time as both trope and topic has earned the novel a place in many syllabi and arguably also in the canon of twentieth-century Spanish American literature.1 Indeed, together with her well-known short story ‘‘La culpa es de los Tlaxcaltecas,’’ it is Los recuerdos del porvenir, Garro’s first published novel, that has garnered the most attention from critics, not all of whom have lavished praise as hyperbolic as Octavio Paz’s highly charged ‘‘[u]na de las creaciones más perfectas de la literatura hispanomericana contemporánea.’’2 While Paz’s words, written while the couple was married, and still printed on the novel’s back cover today, likely served as an endorsement that assured the novel’s publication, Garro’s multilayered novel has since been studied in myriad ways, due, if not to the novel’s ‘‘perfec- tion,’’ then to its rich complexity. Over the course of the last three decades, scholars have produced a wealth of scholarship on Los recuerdos that offers insights into thematic, stylistic, and theoretical approaches to the novel. Some of these take extra-literary stances, such as: the challenges faced by Latin American women writers to have their work published, read and valued on their own terms; the examination of the historical and historiographical issues related to the representation of the Cristero war (1926–1929) or the shortcomings of the Mexican Revolution, particularly with regard to the failure of proposed land tenure reform; and social conflicts stemming from prejudices in terms of gender, race and class, and the unmitigated use of violence to enforce the social order.3

1. Elena Garro, Los recuerdos del porvenir (Mexico:´ Editorial Joaqu´ın Mortiz, 1963). The novel, set in the years just after the Revolution and at the outset of the Guerra Cristera, tells the story of the isolation, stagnation and immobility of the town of Ixtepec. By having the narrator of her novel be the town itself, Garro cleverly manages to give voice to many of Ixtepec’s dwellers, currently governed by the ruthless general Rosas. Ixtepec is fascinated by Rosas’s love for his mistress, Julia, and then confounded by the Moncada children’s failed attempt to revolt against his dominion. The Moncadas represent the last vestiges of the rural bourgeoisie in Ixtepec. 2. Elena Garro, ‘‘La culpa es de los Tlaxcaltecas,’’ in Obras reunidas, tomo I: Cuentos, (Mexico:´ Fondo de Cultura Economica,´ 2006), 27–40. Octavio Paz, back cover of Garro, Los recuerdos del porvenir. 3. Two recent monographs devoted to Garro attest to continued interest in her work and are a good starting point to review the ever-growing bibliography devoted to her writing: Rebecca E. Biron, Elena Garro and Mexico’s Modern Dreams Echenberg, Garro and Los recuerdos in the Time of Ayotzinapa 65

Studies devoted to the novel itself, meantime, have privileged its narrative structure, notions of time and memory, the emergence of the fantastic, and the controversial resolutions to the conflicts endured by the novel’s two opposing female protagonists, Julia Andrade and Isabel Moncada.4 My reading of Los recuerdos del porvenir builds on existing scholarship in order to suggest the relevance and rich possibilities of interpreting Garro’s novel as engaged in a dialogue with contem- porary Mexico, particularly in the context of the shockingly violent forced disappearance of 43 students, in the town of Iguala, on September 26, 2014, from the Escuela Normal Rural Isidro Burgos in Ayotzinapa, Guerrero. Today, Garro’s historical novel, written over a half century ago, sounds eerily familiar. How can one not be reminded of Iguala when reading lines that describe the town of Ixtepec as ‘‘[un] pueblo cerrado como un pudridero de cadáveres’’ where the men ‘‘desaparec´ıan y en las manãnas encontrábamos los cuerpos de algunos, mutilados y tirados en los llanos que me rodean’’? (263, 164). Ixtepec is at once a town that might exemplify any rural community in Mexico’s southeastern states and a fictional recreation of Iguala, both geographically and socially. Critics agree that Garro culled some of her characters and the social dynamics of the town under military rule from her own childhood memories of

- (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2013) and Sandra M. Cypess, Uncivil Wars. Elena Garro, Octavio Paz and the Battle for Cultural Memory (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2014). Other works that examine the novel in a larger context are Ute Seydel, Narrar historia(s): La ficcionalizacion´ de temas historicos´ por las escritoras mexicanas Elena Garro, Rosa Beltran´ y Carmen Boullosa (Frankfurt am Main/Madrid: Iberoamericana-Vervuert, 2007), Sarah E. L. Bowskill, ‘‘Women, Violence, and the Mexican Cristero Wars in Elena Garro’s Los recuerdos del porvenir and Dolores Castro’s La ciudad y el viento,’’ The Modern Language Review. 104, no. 2 (April 2009): 438–452 and Cecilia Eudave, ‘‘La memoria como escenario de la tragedia mexicana en Los recuerdos del porvenir de Elena Garro,’’ Romance Notes. 57, no. 1 (2017): 15–24. 4. See, for example, Margarita Leon,´ La memoria del tiempo. La experiencia deltiempoydelespacioenLos recuerdos del porvenir de Elena Garro (Mexico:´ UNAM/ IIF, 2004), Amalia Gladhart, ‘‘Present Absence: Memory and Narrative in Los recuerdos del porvenir,’’ Hispanic Review 73.1 (Winter 2005): 91–111, Jean Franco, ‘‘On the Impossibility of Antigone and the Inevitability of La Malinche: Rewriting the National Allegory’’ in Plotting Women: Gender and Representation in Mexico (NY: Columbia University Press, 1989), 129–146 and Sandra M. Cypess, ‘‘The Figure of the Malinche in the Texts of Elena Garro,’’ in A Different Reality. Studies on the Work of Elena Garro, ed. Anita K. Stoll (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1990), 117–135. 66 Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos growing up in Iguala between 1926 and 1934.5 Ixtepec also neigh- bors Cocula. Its hanged Indigenous peasants—collective characters who are innocent victims and sometimes dissidents who lobby for reform—periodically yet unwaveringly appear near the town’s gate on the road to Cocula. The ‘‘trancas de Cocula,’’ where the peasants’ bodies are left hanging for all to see as a warning and symbol of the military occupation of Ixtepec, in cahoots with its most powerful landowner, refers to the same Cocula, Guerrero, where the bodies of the 43 disappeared students were supposedly incinerated in a landfill. Plagued with fear and silence, insurgency, impunity and hypocrisy, as well as the crimes of murder and torture, the repressive and exclusionary fictional world of Ixtepec in Los recuerdos serves as a reminder of how critical conflicts such as the violence of gender and racial inequality, the silencing of dissident voices through political repression, as well as the generalized oppression of the poor and disenfranchised remain unresolved in Mexico, especially in states like Guerrero. By focusing on the conflicts that underlie and provoke violence instead of the acts per se, this article seeks, on the one hand, to reaffirm the literary and cultural relevance of studying and teaching Los recuerdos in the twenty-first century and, on the other, to shed light on how literary texts provide insights into the edifice and machinations of cultural and structural violence that lie beneath and ultimately detonate expressions of direct violence. The terms I use are those of Johan Galtung: Firstly, ‘‘direct’’ violence refers to recognizable, visibly violent acts. Secondly, ‘‘cultural’’ violence implies normalized forms of violence that are usually not identified as such and are transmitted through the symbolic sphere of our exis- tence that can be used to legitimize direct or structural violence. The systematic discrimination of Indigenous people and of women in general in Mexico would fall into this category. Thirdly, ‘‘structural’’ violence reflects a social structure of inequality based on exploita- tion.6 Deep seated economic, social, cultural, and political conflicts result in the three types of violence that constantly run into and legitimize one another. In studying the nature of some of these conflicts that are then articulated through language in the novel, I suggest a means to bridge

5. Luc´ıa Melgar and Gabriela Mora, Elena Garro: Lectura multiple´ de una personalidad compleja (Puebla, Mexico:´ Benemerita´ Universidad Autonoma´ de Puebla, 2002), 306. 6. Johan Galtung, ‘‘Cultural Violence,’’ JournalofPeaceResearch.27,no.3 (August 1990): 291. Echenberg, Garro and Los recuerdos in the Time of Ayotzinapa 67

fictionalandrealworldsaswellashistoricalmomentsthatare separated by close to ninety years. Despite having been written in the 1950s and published in the 1960s, and being set during the Cristero conflict of the post revolutionary 1920s, the underlying conflicts of Los recuerdos are arguably similar to those conflicts still unresolved today, that continue to provoke rampant acts of atrocious violence. When thought of this way, the novel’s presentation of all historical moments as violent, as intertwined, and as leaving Ixtepequenõs with the same sense of desolation is more than a literary trope. As Garro surely would have suspected, while the public outcry following the terrible events in Iguala in 2014 was massive, for members of the normalistas’ communities it was but one more episode in a lifetime marred by violence.7 The immediate parallels that can be drawn between the novel and the events of Ayotzinapa are brought to light more fully by looking at the acts of violence as manifestations of structural and culture violence that bolster and institutionalize inequality, which are exacerbated by impunity, and lead to stasis. In his reflections on Chiapas, Galtung has noted that the people ‘‘focus on military and political events like the outbreaks of violence and ceasefire [ ...] rather than on economic, cultural, social, international formations that are static or at most glacially dynamic [ ...]. Most static is the underlying social formation with the indigenous women, poor and rural at the bottom, abused, exploited, suppressed; in a formation mainly run by mestizo men, rich and urban.’’ His diagnosis is patent: ‘‘With no basic conflict transforma- tion, violence will return.’’8 In recreating its past, the collective narrative voice of the town in Garro’s novel reveals deep running fractures in the social fabric. Here, ‘‘las violencias cotidianas, [ ...]consecuenciatambien´ de cientos de gestos de humillacion,´ discriminacion,´ dominacion´ y acallamiento que a menudo pasan desapercibidos, sin obvia signif- icacion´ historica,´ [ ...] casi invisibles para muchos, [ ...]d´ıa a d´ıa minan [ ...] la convivencia, la vida y las posibilidades de futuro.’’9 In

7. Mariana Mora, ‘‘Desaparicion´ forzada, racismo institucional y pueblos ind´ıgenas en el caso Ayotzinapa, Mexico,’’´ ‘‘Debates / Anti-racist Struggles in Latin America,’’ LASAFORUM. 48, no. 2 (Spring 2017): 29–30. 8. Galtung, 50 Years: 100 Peace & Conflict Perspectives (Transcend University Press, 2008), 186, 191, (emphasis in the original, lower case I for Indigenous in original). 9. Luc´ıa Melgar, ‘‘Recuerdos de nuestro porvenir,’’ ‘‘Confabulario,’’ El universal, 22 Nov. 2014, accessed July 24, 2017, http://confabulario.eluniversal.com.mx/ recuerdos-de-nuestro-porvenir/. 68 Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos this article I seek to examine these intense divisions recreated fiction- ally in Los recuerdos that have their non-fictional counterparts in Mexican society, culture, history and its ineffective democracy. Indeed, said divisions—existing as gender, racial, class, and religious distinctions—are so ingrained culturally and institutionally that they permeate many aspects of life. In the worst case scenario these are paired with the impunity of the perpetrators and a generalized collective sense of impotence, and have led to manifestations of horrendous violence, such as the forced disappearance of the 43 young men who were studying to be teachers in Ayotzinapa. I also argue that the sense of stasis and the cancellation of the future in Garro’s novel can be tied to a reading of the history of impunity in the state of Guerrero. Although the perpetrators have changed over the years, the victims continue to be the poor and the disenfranchised and, often, those individuals who raise their voices against injustice. Exacerbating the horrendous crimes carried out in Iguala is the fact that the murder of students in a state whose government operates on illegality, impunity and fear is a direct means of negating the future and of cancelling out the possibility of change.10 This was a topic that preoccupied Garro and it appears time and again in her work, particularly insofar as she understood the Mexican Revolution to have ‘‘resulted mainly in the imposition of new forms of old repressive systems.’’11 Garro’s negation of the future has been interpreted in various ways: as an opposing view to Octavio Paz’s and other members of the ruling intellectual class’s desire to spur the nation towards a future and progress-oriented modernity;12 in dystopian, or even apocalyptic terms;13 and as mythical rendering of circular or ceaseless time.14 In my reading, negating the future or condemning

10. On impunity, see Guillermo Trejo, ‘‘La industria criminal en Mexico,’’´ El pa´ıs, October 16, 2014, accessed April 26, 2016, http://elpais.com/elpais/2014/10/14/ opinion/1413308987_673533.html. See Marco A. Jimenez,´ ‘‘Ayotzinapa 43: The Corruption of the Mexican State,’’ Educational Philosophy and Theory. 48, no.2 (2016): 119–122 for an overview of state corruption (although some of the facts about the crime are stated incorrectly here as Jimenez’s´ text dates from November, 2014). On the 43 of Ayotzinapa, see Sergio Gonz´alez Rodr´ıguez, Los 43 de Iguala. Mexico:´ verdad y reto de los estudiantes desaparecidos (Barcelona: Anagrama, 2015) and the most recent report of the Grupo Interdisciplinario de Expertos Independientes’’ (GIEI): ‘‘Informe Ayotzinapa II,’’ accessed May 27, 2017, http://prensagieiayotzi.wixsite.com/ giei-ayotzinapa/informe-. 11. Biron, Elena Garro, 206. 12. Ibid., 143–187. 13. Cypess, ‘‘The Figure of the Malinche in the Texts of Elena Garro,’’ 117–135. 14. On the notion of cyclical time, see Cynthia Duncan, ‘‘La culpa es de los Tlaxcaltecas: A Reevaluation of Mexico’s Past through Myth,’’ Cr´ıtica Hispanica´ . 7, no. Echenberg, Garro and Los recuerdos in the Time of Ayotzinapa 69

it to a reflection of the awful, painful past is not a celebration of mythical Mexican time, but rather an indictment of a feudal-like society in which the idea of any future, modern or otherwise, is unthinkable. At a time in which her fellow intellectuals were concerned with mexicanidad, insofar as it implied an ushering in of modernity for the nation, Garro understood that what was needed was effective democracy in order to break out of the historical patterns of inequality and injustice.15 So, while arguably much of Garro’s work denounces injustice and privileges dissident and morally upstanding voices (for example, those of Felipe Ańgeles and Emiliano Zapata), there is a particular necessity in revising interpretations of Los recuerdos vis-a`-vis the state of affairs in present day Guerrero.16 As Umberto Eco argues in The Limits of Interpretation, there is no question that as readers we must look for what the text says in reference to its own coherence and the context and signifiers it alludes to, yet we must also find meaning in the text that relates to our way of understanding it.17 Thinking about Los recuerdos today reverberates with a Mexico permeated with fear, distrust and direct or implicit repression. Tracing these connections expressly can foster critical discussion about Garro’s novel, while at thesametimeofferingapositionontheculturalandhistorical complexities of injustice in Mexico. In this discussion, I concentrate on aspects of the novel that play key roles in the engendering or manifestation of the conflicts that resonate in the particularities of the Ayotzinapa disappearances—at least those that have come to light since there is still much to be ascertained—. These include: the generalized state of social fragmentation in the town; the relationship between language and silence, memory and forgetting, dissidence or insurgency; and, repression, accompanied by impunity and hypocrisy. I review Garro’s use of binary opposites that reveal both the individual characters as well as the social fabric of Ixtepec to be disintegrated. As becomes clear, both the narrator’s and the characters’ particular relationship with

- 2 (1985): 105–120. For a discussion of ‘‘the complex interrelation between time, the retelling of historical process and the narrative construction of the nation’’, see Niamh Thornton, ‘‘Where Cuba meets Mexico: Alejo Carpentier and Elena Garro,’’ in Intercultural Spaces: Language, Culture and Identity, eds. Angela Leahy and Aileen Pearson-Evans (NY: Peter Lang, 2007), 257–274. http://uir.ulster.ac.uk/11909/. 15. See Biron, Elena Garro, 13–19. 16. See González Rodr´ıguez, Los 43 de Iguala and Guillermo Trejo and Sandra Ley, ‘‘Federalismo, drogas y violencia,’’ Pol´ıtica y gobierno. 23 no. 1 (2016): 11–56. 17. Umberto Eco, The Limits of Interpretation: Advances in Semiotics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 50–1. 70 Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos remembering and forgetting prove that notions of past and present, language and silence, as well as the rift in Ixtepec itself, are symp- tomatic not only of their individual conditions, but also of a divided and unequal postrevolutionary Mexico. I also consider Garro’s preoccupations—both literary and social—with dissident yet just voices, examining the relationship between insurgency and silence on the one hand, and repression and impunity on the other. There are, in fact, attempts in the novel to challenge the stasis provoked by violent repression. These can be summed up in three distinct yet interrelated categories: (1) nostalgia; (2) fantasy, diversion or ilusion´ ; and (3) rebellion or insurgence. Revealingly, all three possibilities fail: nostalgia is misleading and proves to be false, or simply a means for coping with the present (there is little evidence in the novel of a former time when things were better); and all attempts at ilusion´ and insurgency are quashed, regardless of whether they are mestizo conspirators opposed to the military regime or Indigenous people claiming their rights to land. Significantly, all the failed attempts at breaking out of the impasse that is Ixtepec keep the town divided and hence easier to preserve in a state of constant dread, distrust and paralysis. The hope of the townspeople that an outside force might reprieve them proves illusive, as neither the insurgent Abacuc nor the federal government in Mexico City (represented by the train that invariably arrives empty every afternoon at 6 pm) intervene on their behalf (37). I also argue that, despite the significant change in some of the perpetrators, the unresolved conflicts that provoke division and stasis in Los recuerdos persist today as seems evident in the circumstances regarding the forced disappearance of the 43 students from the Escuela Normal in Ayotzinapa. While today the Church and the military have given way to other repressive potencies, such as organized crime and police forces, the victims continue to be young people who envision another future, and who therefore threaten the status quo that invariably privileges only a few. My reading of the state of stasis of Ixtepec/Iguala shows it to be closely related to the idea of social resistance—and the repression of such resistance, whether carried outdirectlybycriminalorganizations and police personnel or through the silence and neglect of Mexico’s federal government or its military. In both instances, the result is the same for the victims: the cancelling out of the future.18 Insofar as the Ayotzinapa

18. This particularity of Garro’s novel sets it apart from others from the same time period that can also illuminate thinking about inequality in Guerrero, such as a Jose´ Revuelta’s El luto humano (Mexico:´ Editorial Mexico,´ 1943). Echenberg, Garro and Los recuerdos in the Time of Ayotzinapa 71 disappearances represent an egregious example of social, legal and political conﬂicts in present day Mexico that seem insurmountable, and that stem from structural, cultural and direct violence, these disappearances create the impression of impenetrable stasis, which necessarily eradicates the possibility of any future that is not merely the repetition of the past or the present. How can the forced disappearance of young people, indeed of trainee-teacher students, not be considered tantamount to the annihilation of a future?19

***

Division: self and social The notion of division, whether understood as the self being split in two, or the fracture of the social network (itself a manifestation of structural and cultural violence), is crucial to understanding Los recuerdos. Division permeates not only the identity of individual characters and their relation to others, but also other themes of the novel that in turn mirror preoccupations of the postrevolutionary decades and mid-twentieth century, such as land tenure, the division of Church and state, the urban-rural divide and the impetus towards deﬁning Mexico as a modern or traditional nation-state. During these decades, the state of affairs of the intelligentsia was also divided among insiders and outsiders. As Rebecca Biron has persuasively argued, Garro herself remained on the margins of the intelligentsia and from that place of exile (physical or otherwise) questioned and challenged the reigning intellectuals’ appropriation of the notion of Mexico and mexicanidad.20 According to Garro’s reading of her contemporaries, their privileged and exclusionary visions of Mexico were in accord with the dominant political stance that failed to address the schisms in the country between the extremely powerful and inﬂuential elites and the rest of the population,

19. I suggest that this is one of the reasons why the heinous crime has received so much more attention than others. However, the awful truth is that these students form part of a much larger number: official estimates placed the number of disappeared in Mexico in 2015 at over 20,000 while independent organizations reported the figure as being higher. Sergio González Rodr´ıguez, Los 43 de Iguala, 51. Jose´ Reveles cites the figure as ‘‘no menos de 30 mil desaparecidos,’’ Jose´ Reveles, ‘‘Mexico:´ Pa´ıs de desapariciones forzadas,’’ Pol´ıtica y cultura. 43 (primavera 2015): 9–23 and Human Rights Watch’s 2017 Report on Mexico states: ‘‘In August 2016, the government reported that the whereabouts of more than 27,000 people who had gone missing since 2006 remain unknown’’, https://www.hrw.org/world-report/2017/country-chapters/mexico# 107c57, accessed January 22, 2018. 20. Biron, Elena Garro, 13–14. 72 Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos particularly the dispossessed. Garro’s writing can in fact be understood as challenging her contemporaries, writing what might be called the underside of the dominant view, what she herself termed ‘‘el reves´ de las cosas.’’21 Garro’s preoccupation with, and understanding of the visible and dominant side of things, and the accompanying potentially subversive underside may explain her literary penchant for binary opposites. Indeed, arguably all of Los recuerdos is a play on dichotomies: the novel’s structure is divided in two parts; the present competes with the past; and the town is divided among Indigenous and mestizos, between naturals and foreigners, between respectable and morally questionable women, between cristeros and federalists, and so forth. Significantly, not only do these divisions mimic unequal power relations, they also have at their core issues of structural and cultural violence. In Garro’s writing, fragmentation is a symptom of structural and cultural violence, spurred by inequality, and results inevitably in stasis. This idea can be well illustrated in the internal division of the characters themselves. Julia, for example, lives as general Rosas’s captive in Ixtepec’s hotel, all the while remaining elusive, perpetu- ally lost in her thoughts that seem to belong to another time and place: ‘‘[La] querida [de Rosas] se escond´ıa de su mirada [ ...]yse recog´ıa en un mundo lejano, sin ruido, como los fantasmas’’ (44). Similarly, once her brothers leave town, Isabel Moncada seems torn between two selves: a more authentic one linked to her childhood complicity with her brothers, and her current sense of displacement provoked by their departure and her mother’s designs to have her married. ‘‘Hab´ıa dos Isabeles, una que deambulaba por los patios y las habitaciones y la otra que viv´ıa en una esfera lejana, fija en el espacio’’ (31). Their situations are radically different on one level—Isabel is the daughter of one of the most respectable families of Ixtepec and Julia the querida of the irascible Rosas. But on another level they are both victims of structural gendered violence, as one is obliged by her family to marry and the other is deprived of her freedom as the war

21. In the words of the writer captured on film: ‘‘[de ninã] me parec´ıa que ensenãban lo bonito y escond´ıan lo feo, ¿ves? Y que el reves´ era lo feo, y lo escond´ıan para que la gente creyera que todo era perfecto.’’ La cuarta casa: Un retrato de Elena Garro, directed by Jose´ Antonio Cordero, (Conaculta, Instituto Mexicano de Cine y Centro de Capacitacion´ Cinematográfica, 2002) https://www.youtube.com/watch? v¼PW9zOHJCK7c accessed June 10, 2016, See also Elena Garro, ‘‘A m´ı me ha ocur- rido todo al reves,’’´ Cuadernos hispanoamericanos. 346 (abril 1979): 38–51. Echenberg, Garro and Los recuerdos in the Time of Ayotzinapa 73 bounty of the young general. Interestingly, both female characters eventually break away from those who are trying to restrict them, yet their actions are perceived by the townspeople as anomalies that might impact them, or perhaps their families, but are not transcendental in terms of changing the state of affairs for women in Ixtepec. Julia’s escape from Rosas is cloaked in the fantastic as ‘‘time’’ first recedes, transforming Julia into a twelve year old (137), and then stops altogether to allow her and Felipe Hurtado to escape Ixtepec (145). Given that Julia and Felipe are described as being otherworldly (40, 44, 106), their escape from the town also belongs to a realm beyond the grasp of its inhabitants and thus not a viable possibility for emancipation that might be emulated. The narrator’s insistence that nothing like this has ever occurred in the long history of the town and thus is unlikely to ever happen again, upholds this reading (145). For her part, Isabel’s decision to become Rosas’s lover is both a poten- tial means to save her brothers and an affirmation that she is eschewing of marriage. Yet, like Julia (albeit for different reasons), Isabel’s break with established social patterns based on gender roles renders her a marked woman, not a model to imitate. At the close of the novel, it is the medicine woman, Gregoria, who finds the stone she believes to be Isabel. Gregoria’s inscription on the stone that is formed of Isabel’s petrified body determines—through writing, memory and historiography—that Isabel is to be remembered for time eternal as a fallen woman and not as a selfless one whose sacrifice was meant to redeem her brothers (292). As Sarah Bowskill notes, ‘‘Gregoria determines how Isabel will be misremembered in such a way as to ensure that no one will ever know that she tried to save Nicolás. [ ...] Isabel poses such a threat to the social fabric that Gregoria deliberately reconstructs her actions and inscribes a false version of events in stone.’’22 Isabel’s petrification at the end of the novel can of course be interpreted as the ultimate symbol of stasis as a dynamic human life is transfixed into the permanence of stone. The wider implication is that deviance from the socially accepted norm is punished irrepa- rably, thus reinforcing, through a negative example, that women in Ixtepec are to remain like Conchita, the daughter of the widowed Elvira Montufar,´ who is instructed to keep her mouth shut (259). Conchita’s silence is usually attributed to her overbearing mother

22. Bowskill, ‘‘Women, Violence, and the Mexican Cristero Wars in Elena Garro’s Los recuerdos del porvenir and Dolores Castro’s La ciudad y el viento,’’ 445–6. Bowskill’s reading of Gregoria’s manipulative authorship follows the examples of Cynthia Duncan, Amy Kaminsky and Julie Winkler, see Bowskill, 445. 74 Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos and the quiet longing for Nicol´as Moncada that she dare not verbalize. Another way of thinking about Conchita, however, is to questionwhysensiblevoicessuchashersremainsilencedin Ixtepec and in so doing enable the perverse status quo of the repressive military occupation and the town’s culturally violent traditions of chauvinism, classicism and racism to keep on unchallenged. The lesson here appears to be that, regardless of whether a woman is rebellious (like Julia and Isabel) or is obedient (as in the case of Conchita), woman’s lot in Ixtepec is conceived of as unchanging and unwavering. My analysis shows that virtually every character is depicted as waging a battle between two distinct selves. Signiﬁcantly, as in the case of Isabel and Julia, different forms of repression, violence, or loss always provoke the disjunction. Their division, moreover, is expressed in terms of how they conceive of the past, present and future (or fail to do so) and time’s relationship with memory. In each case there is a decided penchant for nostalgia, due perhaps to the unreliability of memory. Nostalgia permeates the novel, rendering the notion of time more than a rift between chronometric and diametric orders.23 Although few scholars have paid close attention to notions of nostalgia, a notable exception is Christina Karageorgou- Bastea, who has examined the utopian bent of the novel as a nostalgic and regressive desire to return to a Golden age that ultimately traps the characters, depriving them of all agency.24 In Los recuerdos nostalgia can be understood as the negation of the future, as indicated by the title of Garro’s novel, while neverthe- less retaining the multivalent possibilities offered when considered in a utopian or revolutionary sense. The conjunction of nostalgia and utopia entails believing that the idealized past can be restored in the present or the future. The revolutionary possibilities, meanwhile, are best suggested in Jameson’s reading of Walter Benjamin: ‘‘But if

23. For example: Ana Moncada thinks longingly of revolutionary times in her native Chihuahua and, ‘‘como todos nosotros, padec´ıa una nostalgia de catástrofes’’ (37); the military men, also northerners, long for a time when they were not condemned to rule over Ixtepec (109), much as their lovers, locked in the town’s hotel, yearn to return home (236). Interestingly, Rosas’s sense of nostalgia is intertwined with the Revolution and, later, with his lover: ‘‘Antes de Julia su vida era una noche alta por la que el´ iba a caballo cruzando la Sierra de Chihuahua. Era el tiempo de la Revolucion,´ pero el´ no buscaba lo que buscaban sus compan˜eros villistas, sino la nostalgia de algo ardiente y perfecto en que perderse’’ (79). 24. Christina Karageorgou-Bastea, ‘‘Memoria y palabra en Los recuerdos del porvenir,’’ Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, 85, no. 1 (2008): 79–95. Echenberg, Garro and Los recuerdos in the Time of Ayotzinapa 75 nostalgia as political motivation is most frequently associated with Fascism, there is no reason why a nostalgia conscious of itself, a lucid and remorseless dissatisfaction with the present on the grounds of some remembered plenitude, cannot furnish as adequate a revolutionary stimulus as any other.’’25 Nostalgia thus can be an impetus for revolt and appears as such in Garro’s novel. Nostalgia is a constant yet vague presence that pervades the novel, yet what the characters long for remains unspoken and even unintelligible to some. My interpretation is that the characters wish for the state of things to be different, perhaps as they were once, —before Rosas, before the occupation of the town, and before the enchantment of Julia. While there seems to be little evidence that life in Ixtepec had been better in the past, the innocence of childhood at least promised an alternative to entrapment, division, repressions and stasis. The Moncada children’s desire to return to the idyll of childhood, freed from the economic and social constraints that force Juan and Nicolás to separate from their sister and work in the mines, or the norms that oblige Isabel to find a husband, is an example of how utopian nostalgia functions in the novel. More than sibling love bonds the three: they share a longing for an imaginary world, such as that invoked when they rehearse the play (planned in the first part of the novel): ‘‘Los jovenes´ [ ...] alcanzaban un reino diferente en que danzaban y hablaban tambien´ de una manera diferente. [ ...] Ana Moncada [ ...] por primera vez los ve´ıa tal como eran y en el mundo imaginario que deseaban desde ninõs’’ (119–20). Utopian and revolutionary nostalgia conjoin in the form of Abacuc and other revolutionary Zapatistas. These characters, who represent continuities in the present of historically insurgent figures, are illusive alternatives to a nostalgia that negates the future and perpetuates a state of resignation vis-a`-vis the status quo. Abacuc is a former revolutionary who fought alongside Zapata until the latter’s murder. In the second part of the novel, we learn that Abacuc, now a Cristero, is organizing a resistance movement against the federal government in the mountains of Guerrero. Rosas sees him as a poten- tial threat and it follows that the narrator suggests that Ixtepec awaits his arrival as they might a savior (169–70). And yet there is no sign of his ever arriving in the town; his presence looms but never materi- alizes. Similarly, the narrator speaks of the much-anticipated return of the Zapatistas in redemptory terms: ‘‘Por [ ...] culpa [de los militares] los zapatistas se hab´ıan ido a un lugar invisible para nuestros

25. Frederick Jameson, Marxism and Form: Twentieth Century Theories of Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972), 82. 76 Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos ojos y desde entonces esperábamos su aparicion.´ [ ...] En esos d´ıas aun´ cre´ıamos en [ ...]eldespertargozosodelregreso.[...]Me pesaban los d´ıas y estaba inquieto y zozobrante esperando el milagro’’ (15). Needless to say, Ixtepec waits in vain: ‘‘Hab´ıamos vivido tantos anõs en la espera que ya no ten´ıamos otra memoria’’ (268). ‘‘Nadie ven´ıa. Nadie se acordaba de nosotros’’ (165). Clearly, nostalgia and waiting are linked together. Both seem to break with chronometric time and it remains uncertain whether what can end the impasse of interminable waiting lies in the revival of the revolutionary past or in the impossible future represented by the empty train (literally, a indi- cation of the lack of interest in the town and, figuratively, a symbol of a failed and barren, yet supposedly modern, Mexico). If violence, repression, and a sense of loss cause the characters to feel divided, notions of memory and forgetting, and their connection to nostalgia are the keys to understanding their respective division and can also lay out the groundwork to deciphering the larger collective fragmentation of Ixtepec itself. In fact, remembering and forgetting,closelytiedwithspeechandsilence,informtheunderlying questions in Garro’s novel: What or whom is to be remembered about Ixtepec and by whom? Who speaks and who remains silent? The ambiguity and vagueness of the oft-quoted beginning of the novel encourage precisely these questions: ‘‘Estoy y estuve en muchos ojos. Yo solo´ soy memoria y la memoria que de m´ı se tenga’’ (11). Margarita Leon´ cogently suggests that the novel’s town-narrator chooses to remember and speak of the moment of the tragedy of the Moncada family during the Cristero revolt while banishing most memories to the exile of forgetting.26 Yet there is also textual evidence that suggests that this is just one tragic episode of many that ultimately will not transform the town of Ixtepec. In tracing its origins, the town-narrator suggests that its history is one of interminable violence, thus disavowing the possibility that things were once better, or that they may one day be otherwise. Indeed it is violence that unites distinct historical moments and makes time seem an endless present:

Yo supe de otros tiempos: fui fundado, sitiado, conquistado y engalanado para recibir ejercitos´ [ ...] Despues´ me dejaron quieto mucho tiempo. Un d´ıa aparecieron nuevos guerreros que me robaron y me cambiaron de sitio [ ...] Hasta que otro ejercito´ de tambores y generales jovenes´ entro´ para llevarme de trofeo a una montan˜a llena de agua [ ...]. Cuando la Revolucion´

26. Leon,´ La memoria del tiempo, 23. Echenberg, Garro and Los recuerdos in the Time of Ayotzinapa 77 agonizaba, un ultimo´ ejercito,´ envuelto en la derrota, me dejo´ abandonado en esta lugar sediento (11).

The narrator of the novel relies on observing Ixtepec and recording in its ‘‘unreliable memory’’ (197) what the town perceives as the most significant or transcendental events. While these distinctive charac- teristics of the narrator signal a different way of telling history,27 tracing history through cataclysmic violent events of a particular place is also one way in which historical narratives operate. Garro seems to be suggesting that the way of recording and storing events operates differently in Ixtepec and yet its history is always marked by a foun- dational story of violent conquest. The characters that find their selves split in two voice their division through memories of the past (or the future) and seem to have difficulty reconciling the present with the past. The title of the novel indicates how this very phenomenon of conjoining the past to the future leads to inaction and stasis, implicitly recalling the endless repetition of violent cycles that are never overcome, but rather are replaced by new ones. The past, in other words, has a tendency to repeat itself endlessly and in so doing condemns the present and jeopardizes the future. As Amalia Gladhart describes: ‘‘The frozen time of Ixtepec extends into its future: what happened once continues to happen ever after.’’28 At the end of the novel, for example, Rosas and his men board the train out of Ixtepec only to be replaced by a new cohort of military men: ‘‘Una tarde se fue [Rosas] en un tren militar con sus soldados y sus ayudantes y nunca más supimos de el.´ Vinieron otros militares a regalarle tierras a Rodolfito y a repetir los ahorcados en un silencio diferente y en las ramas de los mismos árboles, pero nadie, nunca más invento´ una fiesta para rescatar fusilados’’ (292). The invention and plotting of the party to dupe Rosas, organized by the townspeople in the second half of the novel, makes for a good story—or a clever ilusion´ —but does not affect the course of unending injustice and violence in Ixtepec. What does remain constant over time in Ixtepec is the unequal division of the land, not simply as the sign of a failed Revolution, but of the severe structural violence that allows the dispossessed to be constantly at the mercy of corrupt authority figures who unjustly separate them from the little

27. For a discussion of writing history in novels, see, for example, Seydel, Narrar historia(s): La ficcionalizacion´ de temas historicos´ por las escritoras mexicanas Elena Garro, Rosa Beltran´ y Carmen Boullosa, 2007. 28. Gladhart, ‘‘Present Absence: Memory and Narrative in Los recuerdos del porvenir,’’ 104. 78 Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos they have. Also unchanging are the hanged Indigenous people and the silence of the townspeople on this matter, a sign of their indirect accountability. Surely the murdered Indigenous people serve as a warning to abide by Rosas’s authority, protected in turn by his absolute impunity. At the same time, the hanged Indigenous people serve as a constant reminder of the townspeople’s inability or unwillingness (sparked by either fear or habit) to decry the injustice suffered.29 When the agrarian Ignacio is murdered, only Juan Carinõ, the town’s ‘‘best madman,’’ denounces it and declares a strike at the brothel where he lives. Indeed the narrator suggests that the refusal of the mestizos to recognize their Indigenous origins leads to self-deception and simulation, which in turn ensure the stasis of Ixtepec: ‘‘[Los mestizos] [h]ab´ıan establecido la violencia y se sent´ıan en una tierra hostil, rodeados de fantasmas. [ ...] [S]e sent´ıan sin pa´ıs y sin cultura, soste- niendose´ en unas formas artificiales, alimentadas solo´ por el dinero mal habido. Por su culpa mi tiempo estaba inmovil’’´ (27). According to the narrator, only violence interrupts the stupor the town has fallen into: ‘‘Para romper los d´ıas petrificados solo´ me quedaba el espejismo ineficaz de la violencia’’ (64). Yet, it seems clear that violence, in its structural, cultural and direct forms, plays its part in causing the inertia, lethargy and silence of Ixtepec. Trying to break the pattern of violence seems as futile as Juan Carinõ’s attempt to trap the words of violence and evil on the streets of Ixtepec and imprison them in the dictionary so that they might not cause harm. Yet, there are examples of the townspeople’s attempts to interrupt the apathy of the occupied town that are not violent in of themselves, but perhaps not surprisingly, are quashed by violence. The most well-known and studied example is the party held to distract Rosas and his men while the conspirators attempt to save the town’s priest and sexton. The party mimics the aborted play that the Moncadas and Conchita were planning to stage under the guidance of the spectral outsider Felipe Hurtado. Theatre, Hurtado charges, brings with it the ilusion´ so direly needed in Ixtepec: ‘‘El teatro es la ilusion´ y lo que le falta a Ixtepec es eso: ¡La ilusion!’’´ (74). The fact that the play never comes to fruition—although arguably it does in the form of the party—seems yet another signal that the future has been cancelled in the town (‘‘‘Aqu´ı la ilusion´ se paga con la vida’’’

29. See Kristin E. Pitt, Body, Nation, and Narrative in the Americas (NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 113 on Rosas’s treachery and the town’s inability or unwillingness to rethink the concepts of race, class and gender that have facilitated their disenfranchisement. Echenberg, Garro and Los recuerdos in the Time of Ayotzinapa 79

Hurtado later says to Nicolás) (263). The lexical possibilities of the word ilusion´ allow for more than one reading of the phrase: it can refer to the use of the imagination or the deception of the senses (both will be needed to comprehend Felipe and Julia’s magical disappearance or in observing a play); and it can refer to hope, or in this case the lack thereof, once again reaffirming the sense of an impossible or negated future. As the narrator states: ‘‘Hab´ıamos renunciado a la ilusion’’´ (118). One of the simplest explanations for the sense of entrapment of the community of Ixtepec, and yet one that is seldom mentioned, is the impunity of the de facto rulers, General Rosas and the vile landowner Rodolfo Gor´ıbar. While Rosas acts violently more out of retal- iation from being spurned by Julia than due to any particular feelings about Ixtepec, he knowingly allows Rodolfo to benefit from his tyranny, killing Indigenous people at his will and dispossessing them of their lands. Rodolfo’s detestable greed, his collusion with Rosas and by extension with the federal government, and his impunity are best exemplified in the fate of Ignacio. Once a militant who fought with Zapata, Ignacio tries to warn Rodolfo that the agrarians will murder him if he continues to increase his already huge holdings (68). In response to this gesture, Rodolfo first humiliates the agrarian and the next day he is among the five men hanging near the gates of Cocula. Ixtepec’s worst misfortune is understood in the novel as the complicity between Rosas and Gor´ıbar, which repre- sents the ‘‘matrimonio de la Revolucion´ traidora con el porfirismo’’ (72). Their alliance is also indicative of the designs of the leaders of the nation who have pitted rural communities and the Church against federal soldiers, while in Mexico City the highest echelons of political and Church hierarchies are actually in cahoots, the Archbishop entertained at playing cards with the wives of the atheist politicians (154). As members of Ixtepec’s community, the infantilized Rodolfo and his contemptible mother are the real traitors of the town who benefit economically from the state of terror and hypocritically claim to be its most righteous members. The Gor´ıbar family represent the landowning class who remain untouched by the occupation of Ixtepec: their position and wealth allow them to cooperate with Rosas instead of fearing him, and they even remain unaffected by the government prohibition of Church services as they have a chapel in their home. Brutality is used as a means to enforce the social order and to allow very few to retain extraordinary privileges at the expense of the rest of the population. Clearly, the peasants, particularly those who seek to organize in order to claim the rights to the 80 Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos land that had been promised them in the revolutionary period, feel the brunt of the burden.30 The narrator suggests that the Guerra Cristera was little more than a fabrication meant to repress the discontented peasants, particularly those who organized and thus posed a threat to the status quo: ‘‘Entre los porfiristas catolicos´ y los revolucionarios ateos preparaban la tumba del agrarismo. [ ...]La Iglesia y el Gobierno fabricaban una causa para ‘quemar’ a los campesinos descontentos’’ (154). The peasants that hang from the trees on the road to Cocula serve as a reminder of Rodolfo’s and Rosas’s authority and are meant to dissuade anyone from challenging them, particularly those who attempt to express their discontent by banding together, be it in agrarian or guerilla organizations or the town’s collective effort to save the priest and sexton. Everyone in Ixtepec knows that Rodolfo is responsible for the worst violence, yet they also understand that he and his mother simulate respectability only because they can hide behind their impunity. But it also remains true that no one from the town ever challenges Rodolfo, thereby passively consenting to his acts of terror and proving that the town’s social fragmentation renders them particularly vulnerable. In making Julia and Isabel the scapegoats, the town exonerates the treacherous Gor´ıbars (92). When the Cristero revolt breaks out (depicted in the second part of the novel), the narrator asks: ‘‘¿Que´ esperábamos? No lo se,´ solo´ se´ que mi memoria es siempre una interminable espera’’ (157–158). The act of interminable waiting reaffirms the fact that structurally nothing ever changes in Ixtepec, despite chronometric time’s constant march forward and history’s recording of events for posterity. The town’s people, divided within and among themselves, constantly long for a utopic past renewed in the present or a more revolutionary forward-thinking nostalgia, yet are caught waiting seemingly forever.

***

30. Shifting the focus to Garro’s actions beyond the novel that I am discussing, it is signiﬁcant to note that her social activism of the 1950s and ‘60s was aimed at helping communities from Ahuatepec, Morelos, Atlixco, Puebla and Cuernavaca, Morelos, claim their rights to land, by intervening on their behalf at the Secretar´ıa de la Reforma Agraria in Mexico City. See for example, Garro’s ‘‘Breve Historia de Ahuatepec I-IV’’, published in 1959 in Presente! and reproduced in Patricia Rosas Lop´ategui, El asesi- nato de Elena Garro (Mexico:´ Porrua/´ Universidad Autonoma´ del Estado de Morelos, 2005), 96–101. Echenberg, Garro and Los recuerdos in the Time of Ayotzinapa 81

Iguala remembered IturnnowtohowLos recuerdos can illuminate our thinking about the ignominious days of September, 2014, in Iguala, Guerrero. There are indeed many aspects of the novel that prove relevant: stasis; the cancelling of the future; the repetition of endless cycles of violent repression; the complicity and impunity of reprehensible authority figures who impede social cohesion to retain their power; and the notion of forsaken communities. The novel can also enable consideration of continuities and discontinuities, particularly in terms of how violence operates in Guerrero, primarily by describing the mechanisms and manifestations of structural and cultural violence. As I have discussed, they have inequality at their core, are exacerbated by impunity and lead to stasis. In contrast to the focus on direct violence that operates in the state, my focus is on key elements such as impunity, social resistance, and racial discrimination, all of which are paramount in Garro’s fictional project. Another area in which the novel can prove enlightening is the telling of the events of Ayotzinapa. Drawing on Garro’s ideas on memory as slippery, social, and yet defining and determining, I ask the question: what will be remembered of the 43 students of Ayotzinapa? The two reports of the commission of experts, el Grupo Interdisciplinario de Expertos Independientes (GIEI) named by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR), published in September, 2015 and April, 2016, respectively, provide evidence that was missing from initial press coverage of the events and the federal government’s statements.31 The current federal administra- tion clearly would like the story to be buried as soon as possible and never remembered. According to the evidence, on September 26, 2014, a group of forty-seven young men from the Escuela Normal in Ayotzinapa set out for Iguala in order to procure buses that would transport them to Mexico City to participate in the yearly demonstration held to commemorate the anniversary of the 1968 massacre of students in Tlatelolco. The students intended to steal the buses, as they did every year, yet their crime does not in any way correspond to the atrocities

31. The two reports (each over 500 pages) and their respective Executive sum- maries are available in Spanish and English versions online: Grupo Interdisciplinario de Expertos Independientes (GIEI), ‘‘Informe Ayotzinapa: Investigacion´ y primeras conclusiones de las desapariciones y homicidios de los normalistas de Ayotzinapa’’ and ‘‘Informe Ayotzinapa II: Avances y nuevas conclusiones sobre la investigacion,´ busqueda´ y atencion´ a las v´ıctimas,’’ accessed May 27, 2017, http://prensagieiayotzi. wixsite.com/giei-ayotzinapa/informe-. 82 Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos that ensued.32 Unmitigated violence was carried out that night on the young men (known pejoratively as the ‘‘Ayotzis’’).33 The second report of the GIEI traces several moments of intense brutality, carried out in nine different parts of Iguala or nearby that night, suggesting that the attacks were coordinated (II: 5). Six people were executed and more than forty injured (I: 311–312). The whereabouts of the 43 disappeared students is still unknown. Federal agencies, including federal police forces sighted by witnesses and members of the military base only meters away from one of the sites of the attack have remained silent.34 The GIEI concluded in September, 2015, that the original investigation carried out by Mexican authorities had been marred by the mishandling, and possible destruction, of key evidence.35 What remains unclear to the investigators of the GIEI is why this year the procuring of the buses would be so heinously vindicated. A hypothesis put forth by the commission suggests that the students may have unwittingly stolen a bus ﬁlled with heroine.36

32. GIEI, ‘‘Informe Ayotzinapa,’’ I: 24–34. 33. This also included people mistaken to be them, as was the case with ‘‘los Avispones’’, a youth soccer team from Chilpancingo. ‘‘Informe Ayotzinapa II’’, 18–23. 34. The Informe Ayotzinapa II details the lack of cooperation of the military in particular: ‘‘En el caso de los miembros del 27 Batallon,´ se incluye además de una reconstruccion´ de hechos y declaraciones, las preguntas que el GIEI considera que se deben responder y que no tuvo oportunidad de realizar por la negativa a llevar a cabo alguna de las diferentes opciones planteadas’’ (6). All of the petitions made to SEDENA are included in the report (152–155). 35. The Mexican government has shielded the military by withholding docu- ments and by not allowing the GIEI to interview members of the 27th Batallon´ de Infanter´ıa who witnessed, photographed, and reported the students’ detention, before their disappearance. ‘‘Los asuntos militares o de inteligencia son aspectos delicados en cualquier pa´ıs cuando tocan aspectos de seguridad nacional, lo cual no es aplicable frente al caso de Ayotzinapa, en donde se trata de una desaparicion´ forzada masiva ocurrida en un territorio con fuerte presencia de fuerzas policiales y militares. No facilitar o impedir el acceso a cualquier informacion,´ no solo´ para el GIEI sino para la PGR encargada de dicha investigacion,´ supone una limitacion´ clave en la lucha contra la impunidad’’ (II: 598). At the end of their second report, the GIEI identifies twenty- one problems in the matter of investigating Human Rights violations in Mexico. Among these are: obstruction of the investigation, fraudulent practices in taking declarations, failure to analyze the context, and re-victimizing and criminalizing the victims (II: 577). 36. ‘‘La opacidad de la existencia de este autobus´ [a fifth bus not investigated by authorities], las contradicciones evidentes del testimonio del chofer, as´ı como una carta encontrada con su firma que confirma el testimonio de los normalistas, fueron parte de las cuestiones que llevaron al GIEI a plantear una hipotesis´ del caso que deb´ıa ser investigada. Esta hipotesis´ es la posibilidad de que dicho autobus´ podr´ıa haber sido un medio de transporte de la hero´ına que se produce en la zona, lo que podr´ıa explicar el nivel de operativo dirigido a no dejar salir los autobuses, al cerco en la carretera que se muestra en este estudio y la agresion´ creciente contra ellos, con Echenberg, Garro and Los recuerdos in the Time of Ayotzinapa 83

The official story claims that members of the criminal organization, ‘‘Guerreros Unidos,’’ acting under the instruction of the mayor of Iguala, JoseLuisAbarcaVel´ ázquez, and his wife, Mar´ıa de los Ańgeles Pineda Villa, both of whom were known to be implicated in the organization, kidnapped, tortured, murdered and incinerated the students’ bodies in Cocula’s dump, unimpeded by the municipal police. Scientific evidence has proven this theory regarding the disposal of the bodies improbable.37 While many questions remain, Mexico’s federal government has not taken any more action to inves- tigate these events despite the recommendations of the GIEI who believe that:

Mientras no se esclarezcan los hechos y no se ubique el paradero de los normalistas, las busquedas´ deben continuar. Justo esta es la razon´ por la cual la desaparicion´ forzada se considera una violacion´ de derechos humanos de car´acter permanente o continuado (II: 324).

In the days and months after the massacre there was enormous outragebothinMexicoandabroad,voicedmostlyineditorials, online social networks, and public demonstrations that paralyzed Mexico City.38 Yet the generalized outcry could do little to curb the federal government’s position on the massacre. At ﬁrst this position was one of claiming it to be an internal, state and municipal affair; and, later, accepting that an international commission should inves- tigate the crimes, fully aware that much of the evidence had already been tampered with. The response to the massacre thus also connects with Garro’s novel with its unclear solutions, a show of indignation and a demand for accountability that falls on deaf ears. There are obvious links with the episode in Los recuerdos in which themadmanJuanCarin˜o demands an explanation regarding Ignacio’s murder from Rosas, only to be left waiting all day, as the general had slipped out the back door of the garrison (88). The irony of this scene is cutting: not only is the town’s ‘‘loco’’ the only inhabitant of Ixtepec to denounce the crime, but in his delusion,

- la desaparicion´ forzada de los normalistas y el ataque masivo contra el autobus´ de Los Avispones’’ (II: 2). 37. The ‘‘Informe Ayotzinapa II’’ offers a summary of this evidence which includes the work of Dr. Jose´ Torero of the University of Queensland, the report of the Equipo Argentino de Antropolog´ıa Forense (EAAF), as well as evidence provided by the UNAM’s Centro de Ciencias de la Atmosfera´ (283–284), see also Gonz´alez Rodr´ıguez, Los 43, 15–17. 38. Online participation can be traced through the most popular hashtags related to the case. Among these are: #Yamecanse, #FueElestado, #TodosSomosAyotzinapa, and #AccionGlobalPorAyotzinapa. 84 Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos

Carinõ believes himself to be Mexico’s president and in that role demands justice. At the outset of the novel, the narrator explains that the moment retrieved from memory to be recounted is one in which the town is emerging from almost two decades of military occupation: first, during the Revolution when the Constitutionalist army and the Zapatistas claimed to represent Ixtepec’s best interest but both pillaged the town, and, later, under the federal army, who purported to uphold the new constitution and enforce revolutionary policies such as agrarian reform, but in effect increased the holdings of the Gor´ıbar family, murdered those who resisted, and kept the town awash in fear.39 During this period, state violence is clearly linked to nation building. The increased role of the state worked to establish centralization and hegemony, but certainly didn’t have the interest of rural populations in mind. The Cristero revolt, which pitted the army against the Church, is a good example that clearly left rural communities worse off. In the twenty-first century, where neoliberal initiatives sharpen conflicts and broaden gaps between rich and poor, land reform is still not resolved, there is limited access to health care and education, and state violence careens between commission and omission. The postrevolutionary nationalist project and the military have been sidelined as the federal government seeks to fight networks of organized crime and to cover tracks that map its collusion. Particular events in Guerrero may offer insights. For example, the southeastern state seems to be at war with itself.40 The problems that a fragile democracy and extreme social injustice have brought about in Mexico in general seem to be exacerbated in Guerrero. These include: the fragmentation of the social fabric, the lack of governance, the impunity and abuse of power of corrupt officials, an intense military presence, an obsession with greed and simulation, the silencing of activists, and the extreme vulnerability of the poor.41 What may seem to be cycles of direct violence may well be the continuity of structural and cultural violence. Therefore, Garro’s suggestion that we fuse past and present

39. See Kristin E. Pitt, ‘‘National Conflict and Narrative Possibility in Faulkner and Garro,’’ Comparative Literature and Culture, 8 no. 2 (2006): 2–15. 40. Several criminal organizations, together with local politicians, battle one another and victimize the population in a strategic territorial war for mobilizing narcotics in the ‘‘tierra caliente’’ and the state has ten active guerilla groups—clearly, the federal government has left it to its own devices or is simply one more player in this ignominious tangle, see González Rodr´ıguez, Los 43, 66–72, 31–32. 41. See Mora, ‘‘Desaparicion´ forzada,’’ 29–30, Guillermo Trejo, ‘‘La industria criminal en Mexico,’’´ and González Rodr´ıguez, Los 43, 19–56. Echenberg, Garro and Los recuerdos in the Time of Ayotzinapa 85 to predict a similar future seems apt: the state of continued injustice confirms the very idea of ‘‘recuerdos del porvenir.’’ Political scientist, Guillermo Trejo, has stated something very similar: ‘‘En la masacre de Iguala convergen pasado, presente y futuro.’’42 Examining the region historically—or continuously, as Garro would have said—facilitates the contextualization of the events of the Ayoztinapa students, and indicates that this is not a random occurrence, but rather an egregious example in a catastrophic state of affairs. The scope of the history of violence in the state of Guerrero is obviously complex, with a long trajectory of lawlessness, with the poor affected most, while government officials at all levels have either turned a blind eye or have engaged directly in criminal activ- ities. As Trejo has noted: ‘‘Aunque el mundo ha cambiado y Mexico´ y Guerrero han cambiado, la impunidad es constante.’’43 With its role diminished, the neoliberal state has altered its political and ethical responsibility to protect its citizens.Inthisscenario,the notions of rebellion and resistance, key in Garro’s fiction, are replaced with the need for resilience that strips individuals and communities of advocacy. As Sarah Bracke has shown, in neoliber- alism, rewarding resilience can be a means to silently keep resistance to injustice at bay. A key component of the neoliberal cultural project erases resistance and the imagination and with it any notion of the future.44 Garro’s proposals for resistance in her novel—Ignacio’s demands, the party, Isabel’s sacrifice, Abacuc—all fail, but they serve to help flush out the particular conflicts that underlie them; long- standing conflicts, such as racism, that undeniably keep Ixtepec divided. Anthropologist Mariana Mora has noted how there has been virtually no discussion of the fact that some of the disappeared students were not only from rural communities, but also members of Mixteco, Talpaneco, Nahua and Huave Indigenous communities.45 The omission is telling in that it suggests that no importance is given to the impact racism and other historical exclusions have on gross violations of human rights such as those carried out in Iguala in 2014.46 Peasants in Guerrero, whether mestizo or Indigenous, are

42. Trejo, ‘‘La industria.’’ 43. Ibid. 44. Sarah Bracke, ‘‘Bouncing Back: Vulnerability and Resistance in Times of Resilience,’’ in Vulnerability in Resistance, eds. Judith Butler, Zeynep Gambetti and Leticia Sabsay (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016), 52–75. 45. Mora, ‘‘Desaparicion´ forzada’’, 29. 46. Ibid. 86 Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos accustomed to extreme marginalization, structural exclusion, discrimination, and acts of unmitigated violence. The dynamics of social resistance in Guerrero are another key factor that can be served by the lens of Garro’s fiction. The disinte- gration of the state’s social fabric has occurred over time, such that hypocrisy, greed and repression have been the order of the day for so long that they have become normalized and are extenuated in a society that fosters impunity. Accustomed to resistance, the Escuela Normal has an openly Maoist agenda. The Isidro Burgos Normal forms part of a project that dates back to the era of Lázaro Cárdenas, originally created to train young men from the region to be teachers in rural areas.47 Many of the schools have fallen into decay from underfunding. They have a history of resistance and have produced famous dissidents, not least, Lucio Cabanãs, leader of the guerrilla group el Partido de los pobres, active in Guerrero in the 1970s.48 There are obvious historical and ideological ties between the normalistas’ agenda and Zapata’s agrarian revolutionary movement. Zapata figures in Los recuerdos as an insurgent in his fight against injustice who endures in characters like Abacuc or Ignacio, yet is unable to transform the stupor of stasis, in which rebels, particularly when organized, are crushed. Garro’s novel thus helps explain why the 43 students were seen as impediments in the vested interests of the powers that be and thus paid with their lives, much like Ignacio, the agrarian. I draw on Trejo to describe this further:

Para lograr la hegemon´ıa local, los grupos del crimen organizado requieren de una sociedad desarticulada y aterrorizada, incapaz de cuestionar y deso- bedecer los dictados de las autoridades de facto. [ ...] [C]uando las zonas estrategicas´ para el trasiego y la produccion´ de droga est´an en lugares donde operan fuertes movimientos sociales y comunitarios—como Iguala—, los grupos criminales intentan doblegar a los colectivos sociales mediante la compra de sus l´ıderes o mediante la represion´ selectiva y ejecuciones ejemplares. La masacre de los estudiantes normalistas de Ayotzinapa fue una accion´ estrategica´ y premeditada para sembrar terror y doblegar a los grupos de la sociedad civil que en Iguala [ ...] participaban en distintos procesos de articulacion´ social.49

That Garro’s novel turns on the notion of division and fragmentation is a testament to her understanding of these strategies. A population

47. See Tanal´ıs Padilla, ‘‘Memories of Justice: Rural Normales and the Cardenista Legacy,’’ in Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos, 32 no.1 (2016): 111–143. 48. Gonz´alez Rodr´ıguez, Los 43, 28–29. 49. Trejo, ‘‘La industria.’’ Echenberg, Garro and Los recuerdos in the Time of Ayotzinapa 87 that is divided can be more easily manipulated out of their fear of crimes that they understand will never be punished.

***

Closing the door on the future Garro’s novel suggests that change will always be illusive for Ixtepec since, according to James Mandrell, it ‘‘requires imagination and insight beyond most people, who are mired in the violence and ennui of everyday life.’’50 As Garro describes: ‘‘Solo´ un instante antes de morir descubren que era posible sonãr y dibujar el mundo a su manera’’ (248). Meanwhile, those characters who share insights that allow them to make sense of the past and to look imaginatively at ‘‘el reves´ de las cosas’’—Ignacio, Carinõ, Conchita, Hurtado—are forbidden to speak out, discredited or erased. Imagination also proves vital to challenging the official discourse of documented history. I concur with Gladhart when she suggests that, in Los recuerdos, the official version of written historical accounts is desta- bilized ‘‘and yet, the novel offers no alternative. [ ...] Nothing replaces the dominant version perhaps because, as with individual memories, the disordered and unreliable tissue of interwoven recol- lections has no outside, nothing that can take its place.’’51 It follows, then, that in Garro’s novel the future only exists as remembrance, be it plural, unreliable, stable or historical. Whichever way, there can be no prospect for Ixtepec. This can be inferred by the fact that none of the three Moncada children survive beyond their first ventures into adult life. Similarly, the forcible disappearance of students must also be understood as an attempt to cancel the future. Juvenicidio, a term coined by Sergio González Rodr´ıguez52 is a means to prolong stagnation in Guerrero. Ultimately, it is an act that (drawing on George Steiner) closes the door on the future, thereby leading to a state of inertia in knowledge and perception, for as he notes: ‘‘There could be no personal, no social history as we know them, without the ever- renewed springs of life in future-tense propositions.’’53 For Jean Franco the society described in Los recuerdos is salvage- able only through a violent seizure of power or as it might relate to

50. James Mandrell, ‘‘The Prophetic Voice in Garro, Morante, and Allende,’’ Comparative Literature, 42. no. 3 (1990): 233. 51. Gladhart, ‘‘Present Absence,’’ 107. 52. Gonz´alez Rodr´ıguez, Los 43, 26. 53. George Steiner, After Babel. Aspects of Language and Translation (Oxford: Oxford University Press: 1992, [1975]), 167. 88 Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos the ideal polis of literature, the community that narrative plot holds out as its lure and its unattainable goal.54 Franco’s reading upholds the impossibility of a nostalgic and revolutionary utopian desire and locks me into interpreting Garro’s novel as turning endlessly on the same axis. Yet reading the tragedy of Ayotzinapa through the literary lens of Los recuerdos encourages me to question the very act of waiting so prevalent in the novel. How long will the families of the disappeared normalistas have to wait for answers? Waiting might prove futile in Ixtepec, insofar as the town is forsaken and remains reconciled to wait as the cycles of time trace themselves over and over endlessly. But waiting can also be tied to hope and this in turn to the future, to the possibility of being and living otherwise, just as ilusion´ , the imagination, and language can lay the grounds for another future, much like the one that was denied the Moncada children. Words and the imagination challenge the sense of nostalgia that leaves the characters of the novel bewildered. As such, Los recuerdos can encourage readers to reﬂect not only on inaction, but on the need to overturn injustices: to accept a degree of accountability for consenting to the unspeakable crimes committed in Iguala, to remember the victims, to listen and perceive those voices condemned to silence, and to demand an end to impunity. In spite of its unquestionable fatalism, Garro’s novel hints at ways in which the social fabric of the town might be woven together again should structural and cultural violence be attenuated. Instead of obliterating divisive histories, there exist ethical, creative, and political ways of transforming them to improve human lives and relations. Remembrance need not only be of things to come.

54. Jean Franco, Plotting Women, 129.