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 m´as perfectas de la literatura hispanomericana contempor´anea.’’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 narra- tive 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 cad´averes’’ where the men ‘‘desaparec´ıan y en las man˜anas encontr´abamos 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 hypoc- risy, 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 polit- ical repression, as well as the generalized oppression of the poor and disenfranchised remain unresolved in Mexico, especially in states like Guerrero.