re-reading elena garro’s los recuerdos del porvenir in the ... · 1. elena garro, los recuerdos...

Re-reading Elena Garro’s Los recuerdos

del porvenir in the Time of Ayotzinapa

Margo EchenbergTecnologico de Monterrey

This essay explores the possibilities of interpreting the forced disappearanceof the 43 students from the Escuela Normal in Ayotzinapa, Guerrero, throughthe literary lens of Los recuerdos del porvenir by Elena Garro. The socialfragmentation of the fictional town proves crucial to understanding howstructural, cultural, and direct violence determine notions of memory,silence, insurrection, and impunity in the novel. Given that many of theunderlying conflicts depicted through the fictional writing are still present ineveryday life in Guerrero today, they can illuminate key aspects of both thecrimes depicted in the novel and those perpetrated in Iguala in 2014, therebyshedding light on how literary texts provide insights into the edifice andmachinations 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 estudiantesde la Escuela Normal en Ayotzinapa, Guerrero, por medio del prisma de laliteratura. La fragmentacion social del pueblo ficticio de Los recuerdos delporvenir de Elena Garro pone de manifiesto como juntos, la violenciaestructural, la violencia cultural y la violencia directa determinan lasnociones de memoria, silencio, insurreccion e impunidad en la novela. Dadoque algunos de los conflictos sociales que subyacen en la ficcion literariasiguen presentes hoy en Guerrero, estos nos iluminan no solo sobre loscrımenes retratados en la novela, sino tambien sobre aquellos cometidos enIguala en 2014. De este modo se evidencia de que manera los textos literariospueden esclarecer sobre las estructuras y la maquinacion de la violencia.

Palabras clave: Ayotzinapa, Elena Garro, fragmentacion social, Losrecuerdos del porvenir, memoria, violencia.

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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.

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https://doi.org/10.1525/msem.2018.34.1.63

Despite Elena Garro’s marginalized status in terms of the all-maleliterary grouping of writers and novels known as Latin America’s‘‘Boom,’’ her rendering of history and memory in Los recuerdos delporvenir (1963), paired with its controversial female protagonists,experimental narrative style, and use of the notion of time as bothtrope and topic has earned the novel a place in many syllabi andarguably also in the canon of twentieth-century Spanish Americanliterature.1 Indeed, together with her well-known short story ‘‘Laculpa es de los Tlaxcaltecas,’’ it is Los recuerdos del porvenir,Garro’s first published novel, that has garnered the most attentionfrom critics, not all of whom have lavished praise as hyperbolic asOctavio Paz’s highly charged ‘‘[u]na de las creaciones mas perfectasde la literatura hispanomericana contemporanea.’’2 While Paz’swords, written while the couple was married, and still printed onthe novel’s back cover today, likely served as an endorsement thatassured the novel’s publication, Garro’s multilayered novel hassince 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 threedecades, scholars have produced a wealth of scholarship on Losrecuerdos that offers insights into thematic, stylistic, and theoreticalapproaches to the novel. Some of these take extra-literary stances,such as: the challenges faced by Latin American women writers tohave their work published, read and valued on their own terms;the examination of the historical and historiographical issuesrelated to the representation of the Cristero war (1926–1929) orthe shortcomings of the Mexican Revolution, particularly withregard to the failure of proposed land tenure reform; and socialconflicts stemming from prejudices in terms of gender, race andclass, and the unmitigated use of violence to enforce the social order.3

1. Elena Garro, Los recuerdos del porvenir (Mexico: Editorial Joaquın 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

64 Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos

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Studies devoted to the novel itself, meantime, have privileged its narra-tive structure, notions of time and memory, the emergence of thefantastic, and the controversial resolutions to the conflicts enduredby the novel’s two opposing female protagonists, Julia Andrade andIsabel Moncada.4

My reading of Los recuerdos del porvenir builds on existingscholarship in order to suggest the relevance and rich possibilitiesof interpreting Garro’s novel as engaged in a dialogue with contem-porary Mexico, particularly in the context of the shockingly violentforced disappearance of 43 students, in the town of Iguala, onSeptember 26, 2014, from the Escuela Normal Rural Isidro Burgosin Ayotzinapa, Guerrero. Today, Garro’s historical novel, written overa half century ago, sounds eerily familiar. How can one not bereminded of Iguala when reading lines that describe the town ofIxtepec as ‘‘[un] pueblo cerrado como un pudridero de cadaveres’’where the men ‘‘desaparecıan y en las mananas encontrabamos loscuerpos de algunos, mutilados y tirados en los llanos que merodean’’? (263, 164). Ixtepec is at once a town that might exemplifyany rural community in Mexico’s southeastern states and a fictionalrecreation of Iguala, both geographically and socially. Critics agreethat Garro culled some of her characters and the social dynamics ofthe town under military rule from her own childhood memories of

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(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

del tiempo y del espacio en Los 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.

Echenberg, Garro and Los recuerdos in the Time of Ayotzinapa 65

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growing up in Iguala between 1926 and 1934.5 Ixtepec also neigh-bors Cocula. Its hanged Indigenous peasants—collective characterswho are innocent victims and sometimes dissidents who lobby forreform—periodically yet unwaveringly appear near the town’s gateon 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 themilitary occupation of Ixtepec, in cahoots with its most powerfullandowner, refers to the same Cocula, Guerrero, where the bodiesof the 43 disappeared students were supposedly incinerated ina landfill.

Plagued with fear and silence, insurgency, impunity and hypoc-risy, as well as the crimes of murder and torture, the repressive andexclusionary fictional world of Ixtepec in Los recuerdos serves asa reminder of how critical conflicts such as the violence of genderand racial inequality, the silencing of dissident voices through polit-ical repression, as well as the generalized oppression of the poor anddisenfranchised remain unresolved in Mexico, especially in states likeGuerrero. By focusing on the conflicts that underlie and provokeviolence instead of the acts per se, this article seeks, on the one hand,to reaffirm the literary and cultural relevance of studying andteaching Los recuerdos in the twenty-first century and, on the other,to shed light on how literary texts provide insights into the edificeand machinations of cultural and structural violence that lie beneathand ultimately detonate expressions of direct violence. The terms Iuse are those of Johan Galtung: Firstly, ‘‘direct’’ violence refers torecognizable, visibly violent acts. Secondly, ‘‘cultural’’ violenceimplies normalized forms of violence that are usually not identifiedas such and are transmitted through the symbolic sphere of our exis-tence that can be used to legitimize direct or structural violence. Thesystematic discrimination of Indigenous people and of women ingeneral 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 conflictsresult in the three types of violence that constantly run into andlegitimize one another.

In studying the nature of some of these conflicts that are thenarticulated through language in the novel, I suggest a means to bridge

5. Lucıa 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,’’ Journal of Peace Research. 27, no. 3

(August 1990): 291.


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fictional and real worlds as well as historical moments that areseparated by close to ninety years. Despite having been written inthe 1950s and published in the 1960s, and being set during theCristero conflict of the post revolutionary 1920s, the underlyingconflicts of Los recuerdos are arguably similar to those conflicts stillunresolved today, that continue to provoke rampant acts of atrociousviolence. When thought of this way, the novel’s presentation of allhistorical moments as violent, as intertwined, and as leavingIxtepequenos with the same sense of desolation is more thana literary trope. As Garro surely would have suspected, while thepublic outcry following the terrible events in Iguala in 2014 wasmassive, for members of the normalistas’ communities it was butone more episode in a lifetime marred by violence.7

The immediate parallels that can be drawn between the noveland the events of Ayotzinapa are brought to light more fully bylooking at the acts of violence as manifestations of structural andculture violence that bolster and institutionalize inequality, whichare exacerbated by impunity, and lead to stasis. In his reflectionson Chiapas, Galtung has noted that the people ‘‘focus on militaryand political events like the outbreaks of violence and ceasefire[ . . . ] rather than on economic, cultural, social, internationalformations that are static or at most glacially dynamic [ . . . ]. Moststatic is the underlying social formation with the indigenouswomen, poor and rural at the bottom, abused, exploited,suppressed; in a formation mainly run by mestizo men, rich andurban.’’ 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 inGarro’s novel reveals deep running fractures in the social fabric.Here, ‘‘las violencias cotidianas, [ . . . ] consecuencia tambien decientos de gestos de humillacion, discriminacion, dominacion yacallamiento que a menudo pasan desapercibidos, sin obvia signif-icacion historica, [ . . . ] casi invisibles para muchos, [ . . . ] dıa a dıaminan [ . . . ] la convivencia, la vida y las posibilidades de futuro.’’9 In

7. Mariana Mora, ‘‘Desaparicion forzada, racismo institucional y pueblos indıgenas

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. Lucıa Melgar, ‘‘Recuerdos de nuestro porvenir,’’ ‘‘Confabulario,’’ El universal,

22 Nov. 2014, accessed July 24, 2017, http://confabulario.eluniversal.com.mx/

recuerdos-de-nuestro-porvenir/.


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http://confabulario.eluniversal.com.mx/recuerdos-de-nuestro-porvenir/

http://confabulario.eluniversal.com.mx/recuerdos-de-nuestro-porvenir/

this article I seek to examine these intense divisions recreated fiction-ally in Los recuerdos that have their non-fictional counterparts inMexican society, culture, history and its ineffective democracy.Indeed, said divisions—existing as gender, racial, class, and religiousdistinctions—are so ingrained culturally and institutionally that theypermeate many aspects of life. In the worst case scenario these arepaired with the impunity of the perpetrators and a generalized collec-tive sense of impotence, and have led to manifestations of horren-dous violence, such as the forced disappearance of the 43 young menwho were studying to be teachers in Ayotzinapa. I also argue that thesense of stasis and the cancellation of the future in Garro’s novel canbe tied to a reading of the history of impunity in the state of Guerrero.Although the perpetrators have changed over the years, the victimscontinue to be the poor and the disenfranchised and, often, thoseindividuals who raise their voices against injustice.

Exacerbating the horrendous crimes carried out in Iguala is thefact that the murder of students in a state whose government oper-ates on illegality, impunity and fear is a direct means of negating thefuture and of cancelling out the possibility of change.10 This wasa topic that preoccupied Garro and it appears time and again in herwork, particularly insofar as she understood the Mexican Revolutionto have ‘‘resulted mainly in the imposition of new forms of old repres-sive systems.’’11 Garro’s negation of the future has been interpretedin various ways: as an opposing view to Octavio Paz’s and othermembers of the ruling intellectual class’s desire to spur the nationtowards a future and progress-oriented modernity;12 in dystopian, oreven apocalyptic terms;13 and as mythical rendering of circular orceaseless time.14 In my reading, negating the future or condemning

10. On impunity, see Guillermo Trejo, ‘‘La industria criminal en Mexico,’’ El paıs,

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 Gonzalez Rodrıguez, 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,’’ Crıtica Hispanica. 7, no.


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http://elpais.com/elpais/2014/10/14/opinion/1413308987_673533.html

http://elpais.com/elpais/2014/10/14/opinion/1413308987_673533.html

http://prensagieiayotzi.wixsite.com/giei-ayotzinapa/informe-


it to a reflection of the awful, painful past is not a celebration ofmythical Mexican time, but rather an indictment of a feudal-likesociety in which the idea of any future, modern or otherwise, isunthinkable. At a time in which her fellow intellectuals wereconcerned with mexicanidad, insofar as it implied an ushering inof modernity for the nation, Garro understood that what was neededwas effective democracy in order to break out of the historicalpatterns of inequality and injustice.15

So, while arguably much of Garro’s work denounces injusticeand privileges dissident and morally upstanding voices (for example,those of Felipe Angeles and Emiliano Zapata), there is a particularnecessity in revising interpretations of Los recuerdos vis-a-vis the stateof affairs in present day Guerrero.16 As Umberto Eco argues in TheLimits of Interpretation, there is no question that as readers we mustlook for what the text says in reference to its own coherence and thecontext and signifiers it alludes to, yet we must also find meaning inthe text that relates to our way of understanding it.17 Thinking aboutLos recuerdos today reverberates with a Mexico permeated with fear,distrust and direct or implicit repression. Tracing these connectionsexpressly can foster critical discussion about Garro’s novel, while atthe same time offering a position on the cultural and historicalcomplexities of injustice in Mexico.

In this discussion, I concentrate on aspects of the novel that playkey roles in the engendering or manifestation of the conflicts thatresonate in the particularities of the Ayotzinapa disappearances—atleast those that have come to light since there is still much to beascertained—. These include: the generalized state of social fragmen-tation 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 ofbinary opposites that reveal both the individual characters as wellas the social fabric of Ixtepec to be disintegrated. As becomes clear,both the narrator’s and the characters’ particular relationship with

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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 Gonzalez Rodrıguez, Los 43 de Iguala and Guillermo Trejo and Sandra

Ley, ‘‘Federalismo, drogas y violencia,’’ Polıtica 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.


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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 dividedand unequal postrevolutionary Mexico.

I also consider Garro’s preoccupations—both literary andsocial—with dissident yet just voices, examining the relationshipbetween insurgency and silence on the one hand, and repressionand impunity on the other. There are, in fact, attempts in the novelto challenge the stasis provoked by violent repression. These can besummed 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 andproves to be false, or simply a means for coping with the present(there is little evidence in the novel of a former time when thingswere better); and all attempts at ilusion and insurgency are quashed,regardless of whether they are mestizo conspirators opposed to themilitary regime or Indigenous people claiming their rights to land.Significantly, all the failed attempts at breaking out of the impassethat is Ixtepec keep the town divided and hence easier to preserve ina state of constant dread, distrust and paralysis. The hope of thetownspeople that an outside force might reprieve them proves illu-sive, as neither the insurgent Abacuc nor the federal government inMexico City (represented by the train that invariably arrives emptyevery afternoon at 6 pm) intervene on their behalf (37).

I also argue that, despite the significant change in some of theperpetrators, the unresolved conflicts that provoke division and stasisin Los recuerdos persist today as seems evident in the circumstancesregarding the forced disappearance of the 43 students from theEscuela Normal in Ayotzinapa. While today the Church and the mili-tary have given way to other repressive potencies, such as organizedcrime and police forces, the victims continue to be young people whoenvision another future, and who therefore threaten the status quothat invariably privileges only a few. My reading of the state of stasis ofIxtepec/Iguala shows it to be closely related to the idea of socialresistance—and the repression of such resistance, whether carriedout directly by criminal organizations and police personnel orthrough the silence and neglect of Mexico’s federal government orits 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).


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disappearances represent an egregious example of social, legal andpolitical conflicts in present day Mexico that seem insurmountable,and that stem from structural, cultural and direct violence, thesedisappearances create the impression of impenetrable stasis, whichnecessarily eradicates the possibility of any future that is not merelythe repetition of the past or the present. How can the forced disap-pearance of young people, indeed of trainee-teacher students, not beconsidered tantamount to the annihilation of a future?19

***

Division: self and social

The notion of division, whether understood as the self being split intwo, or the fracture of the social network (itself a manifestation ofstructural and cultural violence), is crucial to understanding Losrecuerdos. Division permeates not only the identity of individualcharacters and their relation to others, but also other themes of thenovel that in turn mirror preoccupations of the postrevolutionarydecades and mid-twentieth century, such as land tenure, the divisionof Church and state, the urban-rural divide and the impetus towardsdefining Mexico as a modern or traditional nation-state. During thesedecades, the state of affairs of the intelligentsia was also dividedamong insiders and outsiders. As Rebecca Biron has persuasivelyargued, Garro herself remained on the margins of the intelligentsiaand from that place of exile (physical or otherwise) questioned andchallenged the reigning intellectuals’ appropriation of the notion ofMexico and mexicanidad.20 According to Garro’s reading of hercontemporaries, their privileged and exclusionary visions ofMexico were in accord with the dominant political stance that failedto address the schisms in the country between the extremelypowerful 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 Gonzalez Rodrıguez, Los 43 de Iguala, 51. Jose Reveles cites the

figure as ‘‘no menos de 30 mil desaparecidos,’’ Jose Reveles, ‘‘Mexico: Paıs de desa-

pariciones forzadas,’’ Polıtica 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.


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https://www.hrw.org/world-report/2017/country-chapters/mexico#107c57

particularly the dispossessed. Garro’s writing can in fact be under-stood as challenging her contemporaries, writing what might becalled 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 anddominant side of things, and the accompanying potentially subversiveunderside may explain her literary penchant for binary opposites.Indeed, arguably all of Los recuerdos is a play on dichotomies: thenovel’s structure is divided in two parts; the present competes withthe past; and the town is divided among Indigenous and mestizos,between naturals and foreigners, between respectable and morallyquestionable women, between cristeros and federalists, and so forth.Significantly, not only do these divisions mimic unequal power rela-tions, they also have at their core issues of structural and culturalviolence. In Garro’s writing, fragmentation is a symptom of structuraland cultural violence, spurred by inequality, and results inevitably instasis.

This idea can be well illustrated in the internal division of thecharacters themselves. Julia, for example, lives as general Rosas’scaptive in Ixtepec’s hotel, all the while remaining elusive, perpetu-ally lost in her thoughts that seem to belong to another time andplace: ‘‘[La] querida [de Rosas] se escondıa de su mirada [ . . . ] y serecogıa en un mundo lejano, sin ruido, como los fantasmas’’ (44).Similarly, once her brothers leave town, Isabel Moncada seems tornbetween two selves: a more authentic one linked to her childhoodcomplicity with her brothers, and her current sense of displacementprovoked by their departure and her mother’s designs to have hermarried. ‘‘Habıa dos Isabeles, una que deambulaba por los patios ylas habitaciones y la otra que vivıa en una esfera lejana, fija en elespacio’’ (31).

Their situations are radically different on one level—Isabel is thedaughter of one of the most respectable families of Ixtepec and Juliathe querida of the irascible Rosas. But on another level they are bothvictims of structural gendered violence, as one is obliged by herfamily to marry and the other is deprived of her freedom as the war

21. In the words of the writer captured on film: ‘‘[de nina] me parecıa que

ensenaban lo bonito y escondıan lo feo, ¿ves? Y que el reves era lo feo, y lo escondıan

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 Cinematografica, 2002) https://www.youtube.com/watch?

v¼PW9zOHJCK7c accessed June 10, 2016, See also Elena Garro, ‘‘A mı me ha ocur-

rido todo al reves,’’ Cuadernos hispanoamericanos. 346 (abril 1979): 38–51.


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https://www.youtube.com/watch? v=PW9zOHJCK7c



bounty of the young general. Interestingly, both female characterseventually break away from those who are trying to restrict them, yettheir actions are perceived by the townspeople as anomalies thatmight impact them, or perhaps their families, but are not transcen-dental in terms of changing the state of affairs for women in Ixtepec.Julia’s escape from Rosas is cloaked in the fantastic as ‘‘time’’ firstrecedes, transforming Julia into a twelve year old (137), and thenstops 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 realmbeyond the grasp of its inhabitants and thus not a viable possibilityfor emancipation that might be emulated. The narrator’s insistencethat nothing like this has ever occurred in the long history of the townand 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 iseschewing of marriage. Yet, like Julia (albeit for different reasons),Isabel’s break with established social patterns based on gender rolesrenders her a marked woman, not a model to imitate. At the close ofthe novel, it is the medicine woman, Gregoria, who finds the stoneshe believes to be Isabel. Gregoria’s inscription on the stone that isformed of Isabel’s petrified body determines—through writing,memory and historiography—that Isabel is to be remembered fortime eternal as a fallen woman and not as a selfless one whose sacri-fice was meant to redeem her brothers (292). As Sarah Bowskillnotes, ‘‘Gregoria determines how Isabel will be misremembered insuch a way as to ensure that no one will ever know that she tried tosave Nicolas. [ . . . ] Isabel poses such a threat to the social fabric thatGregoria deliberately reconstructs her actions and inscribes a falseversion of events in stone.’’22

Isabel’s petrification at the end of the novel can of course beinterpreted as the ultimate symbol of stasis as a dynamic human lifeis transfixed into the permanence of stone. The wider implication isthat deviance from the socially accepted norm is punished irrepa-rably, thus reinforcing, through a negative example, that women inIxtepec are to remain like Conchita, the daughter of the widowedElvira 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.


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and the quiet longing for Nicolas Moncada that she dare notverbalize. Another way of thinking about Conchita, however, is toquestion why sensible voices such as hers remain silenced inIxtepec and in so doing enable the perverse status quo of the repres-sive military occupation and the town’s culturally violent traditionsof chauvinism, classicism and racism to keep on unchallenged. Thelesson here appears to be that, regardless of whether a woman isrebellious (like Julia and Isabel) or is obedient (as in the case ofConchita), woman’s lot in Ixtepec is conceived of as unchangingand unwavering.

My analysis shows that virtually every character is depicted aswaging a battle between two distinct selves. Significantly, as in thecase of Isabel and Julia, different forms of repression, violence, or lossalways provoke the disjunction. Their division, moreover, isexpressed in terms of how they conceive of the past, present andfuture (or fail to do so) and time’s relationship with memory. In eachcase there is a decided penchant for nostalgia, due perhaps to theunreliability of memory. Nostalgia permeates the novel, renderingthe notion of time more than a rift between chronometric anddiametric orders.23 Although few scholars have paid close attentionto notions of nostalgia, a notable exception is Christina Karageorgou-Bastea, who has examined the utopian bent of the novel as a nostalgicand regressive desire to return to a Golden age that ultimately trapsthe characters, depriving them of all agency.24

In Los recuerdos nostalgia can be understood as the negation ofthe future, as indicated by the title of Garro’s novel, while neverthe-less retaining the multivalent possibilities offered when considered ina utopian or revolutionary sense. The conjunction of nostalgia andutopia entails believing that the idealized past can be restored in thepresent or the future. The revolutionary possibilities, meanwhile, arebest 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, padecıa una nostalgia de catastrofes’’

(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 companeros 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.


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nostalgia as political motivation is most frequently associated withFascism, there is no reason why a nostalgia conscious of itself, a lucidand remorseless dissatisfaction with the present on the grounds ofsome remembered plenitude, cannot furnish as adequate a revolu-tionary stimulus as any other.’’25 Nostalgia thus can be an impetus forrevolt and appears as such in Garro’s novel.

Nostalgia is a constant yet vague presence that pervades thenovel, yet what the characters long for remains unspoken and evenunintelligible to some. My interpretation is that the characters wishfor the state of things to be different, perhaps as they were once,—before Rosas, before the occupation of the town, and before theenchantment of Julia. While there seems to be little evidence that lifein Ixtepec had been better in the past, the innocence of childhood atleast promised an alternative to entrapment, division, repressionsand stasis. The Moncada children’s desire to return to the idyll ofchildhood, freed from the economic and social constraints that forceJuan and Nicolas to separate from their sister and work in the mines,or the norms that oblige Isabel to find a husband, is an example ofhow utopian nostalgia functions in the novel. More than sibling lovebonds the three: they share a longing for an imaginary world, such asthat invoked when they rehearse the play (planned in the first part ofthe novel): ‘‘Los jovenes [ . . . ] alcanzaban un reino diferente en quedanzaban y hablaban tambien de una manera diferente. [ . . . ] AnaMoncada [ . . . ] por primera vez los veıa tal como eran y en el mundoimaginario que deseaban desde ninos’’ (119–20).

Utopian and revolutionary nostalgia conjoin in the form ofAbacuc and other revolutionary Zapatistas. These characters, whorepresent continuities in the present of historically insurgent figures,are illusive alternatives to a nostalgia that negates the future andperpetuates a state of resignation vis-a-vis the status quo. Abacuc isa former revolutionary who fought alongside Zapata until the latter’smurder. In the second part of the novel, we learn that Abacuc, nowa Cristero, is organizing a resistance movement against the federalgovernment in the mountains of Guerrero. Rosas sees him as a poten-tial threat and it follows that the narrator suggests that Ixtepec awaitshis arrival as they might a savior (169–70). And yet there is no sign ofhis ever arriving in the town; his presence looms but never materi-alizes. Similarly, the narrator speaks of the much-anticipated returnof the Zapatistas in redemptory terms: ‘‘Por [ . . . ] culpa [de los mili-tares] los zapatistas se habıan ido a un lugar invisible para nuestros

25. Frederick Jameson, Marxism and Form: Twentieth Century Theories of

Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972), 82.


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ojos y desde entonces esperabamos su aparicion. [ . . . ] En esos dıasaun creıamos en [ . . . ] el despertar gozoso del regreso. [ . . . ] Mepesaban los dıas y estaba inquieto y zozobrante esperando elmilagro’’ (15).

Needless to say, Ixtepec waits in vain: ‘‘Habıamos vivido tantosanos en la espera que ya no tenıamos otra memoria’’ (268). ‘‘Nadievenıa. Nadie se acordaba de nosotros’’ (165). Clearly, nostalgia andwaiting are linked together. Both seem to break with chronometrictime and it remains uncertain whether what can end the impasse ofinterminable waiting lies in the revival of the revolutionary past or inthe impossible future represented by the empty train (literally, a indi-cation of the lack of interest in the town and, figuratively, a symbol ofa failed and barren, yet supposedly modern, Mexico).

If violence, repression, and a sense of loss cause the characters tofeel divided, notions of memory and forgetting, and their connectionto nostalgia are the keys to understanding their respective divisionand can also lay out the groundwork to deciphering the larger collec-tive fragmentation of Ixtepec itself. In fact, remembering and forget-ting, closely tied with speech and silence, inform the underlyingquestions in Garro’s novel: What or whom is to be rememberedabout Ixtepec and by whom? Who speaks and who remains silent?The ambiguity and vagueness of the oft-quoted beginning of thenovel encourage precisely these questions: ‘‘Estoy y estuve enmuchos ojos. Yo solo soy memoria y la memoria que de mı se tenga’’(11). Margarita Leon cogently suggests that the novel’s town-narratorchooses to remember and speak of the moment of the tragedy of theMoncada family during the Cristero revolt while banishing mostmemories to the exile of forgetting.26 Yet there is also textualevidence that suggests that this is just one tragic episode of manythat ultimately will not transform the town of Ixtepec. In tracing itsorigins, the town-narrator suggests that its history is one of intermi-nable violence, thus disavowing the possibility that things were oncebetter, or that they may one day be otherwise. Indeed it is violencethat unites distinct historical moments and makes time seem anendless present:

Yo supe de otros tiempos: fui fundado, sitiado, conquistado y engalanadopara recibir ejercitos [ . . . ] Despues me dejaron quieto mucho tiempo. Undıa aparecieron nuevos guerreros que me robaron y me cambiaron de sitio[ . . . ] Hasta que otro ejercito de tambores y generales jovenes entro parallevarme de trofeo a una montana llena de agua [ . . . ]. Cuando la Revolucion

26. Leon, La memoria del tiempo, 23.


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agonizaba, un ultimo ejercito, envuelto en la derrota, me dejo abandonadoen esta lugar sediento (11).

The narrator of the novel relies on observing Ixtepec and recording inits ‘‘unreliable memory’’ (197) what the town perceives as the mostsignificant 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 placeis also one way in which historical narratives operate. Garro seems tobe suggesting that the way of recording and storing events operatesdifferently 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 divi-sion through memories of the past (or the future) and seem to havedifficulty reconciling the present with the past. The title of the novelindicates how this very phenomenon of conjoining the past to thefuture leads to inaction and stasis, implicitly recalling the endlessrepetition of violent cycles that are never overcome, but rather arereplaced by new ones. The past, in other words, has a tendency torepeat itself endlessly and in so doing condemns the present andjeopardizes the future. As Amalia Gladhart describes: ‘‘The frozentime of Ixtepec extends into its future: what happened oncecontinues to happen ever after.’’28 At the end of the novel, forexample, Rosas and his men board the train out of Ixtepec only tobe replaced by a new cohort of military men: ‘‘Una tarde se fue[Rosas] en un tren militar con sus soldados y sus ayudantes y nuncamas supimos de el. Vinieron otros militares a regalarle tierrasa Rodolfito y a repetir los ahorcados en un silencio diferente y en lasramas de los mismos arboles, pero nadie, nunca mas invento unafiesta para rescatar fusilados’’ (292).

The invention and plotting of the party to dupe Rosas, organizedby the townspeople in the second half of the novel, makes fora good story—or a clever ilusion—but does not affect the course ofunending injustice and violence in Ixtepec. What does remainconstant over time in Ixtepec is the unequal division of the land, notsimply as the sign of a failed Revolution, but of the severe structuralviolence that allows the dispossessed to be constantly at the mercy ofcorrupt 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.


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they have. Also unchanging are the hanged Indigenous people andthe silence of the townspeople on this matter, a sign of their indirectaccountability. Surely the murdered Indigenous people serve asa warning to abide by Rosas’s authority, protected in turn by hisabsolute impunity. At the same time, the hanged Indigenous peopleserve as a constant reminder of the townspeople’s inability or unwill-ingness (sparked by either fear or habit) to decry the injusticesuffered.29 When the agrarian Ignacio is murdered, only JuanCarino, the town’s ‘‘best madman,’’ denounces it and declares a strikeat the brothel where he lives.

Indeed the narrator suggests that the refusal of the mestizos torecognize their Indigenous origins leads to self-deception and simu-lation, which in turn ensure the stasis of Ixtepec: ‘‘[Los mestizos][h]abıan establecido la violencia y se sentıan en una tierra hostil,rodeados de fantasmas. [ . . . ] [S]e sentıan sin paıs y sin cultura, soste-niendose en unas formas artificiales, alimentadas solo por el dineromal habido. Por su culpa mi tiempo estaba inmovil’’ (27). Accordingto the narrator, only violence interrupts the stupor the town hasfallen into: ‘‘Para romper los dıas petrificados solo me quedaba elespejismo ineficaz de la violencia’’ (64). Yet, it seems clear thatviolence, in its structural, cultural and direct forms, plays its part incausing the inertia, lethargy and silence of Ixtepec.

Trying to break the pattern of violence seems as futile as JuanCarino’s attempt to trap the words of violence and evil on the streetsof Ixtepec and imprison them in the dictionary so that they might notcause harm. Yet, there are examples of the townspeople’s attempts tointerrupt the apathy of the occupied town that are not violent in ofthemselves, but perhaps not surprisingly, are quashed by violence.The most well-known and studied example is the party held todistract Rosas and his men while the conspirators attempt to save thetown’s priest and sexton. The party mimics the aborted play that theMoncadas and Conchita were planning to stage under the guidanceof the spectral outsider Felipe Hurtado. Theatre, Hurtado charges,brings with it the ilusion so direly needed in Ixtepec: ‘‘El teatro es lailusion y lo que le falta a Ixtepec es eso: ¡La ilusion!’’ (74). The factthat the play never comes to fruition—although arguably it does inthe form of the party—seems yet another signal that the future hasbeen cancelled in the town (‘‘‘Aquı 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.


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Hurtado later says to Nicolas) (263). The lexical possibilities of theword ilusion allow for more than one reading of the phrase: it canrefer to the use of the imagination or the deception of the senses(both will be needed to comprehend Felipe and Julia’s magical disap-pearance or in observing a play); and it can refer to hope, or in thiscase the lack thereof, once again reaffirming the sense of an impos-sible or negated future. As the narrator states: ‘‘Habıamos renunciadoa la ilusion’’ (118).

One of the simplest explanations for the sense of entrapment ofthe community of Ixtepec, and yet one that is seldom mentioned, isthe impunity of the de facto rulers, General Rosas and the vile land-owner Rodolfo Gorıbar. While Rosas acts violently more out of retal-iation from being spurned by Julia than due to any particularfeelings about Ixtepec, he knowingly allows Rodolfo to benefit fromhis tyranny, killing Indigenous people at his will and dispossessingthem of their lands. Rodolfo’s detestable greed, his collusion withRosas and by extension with the federal government, and his impu-nity are best exemplified in the fate of Ignacio. Once a militant whofought with Zapata, Ignacio tries to warn Rodolfo that the agrarianswill murder him if he continues to increase his already huge hold-ings (68). In response to this gesture, Rodolfo first humiliates theagrarian and the next day he is among the five men hanging nearthe gates of Cocula. Ixtepec’s worst misfortune is understood in thenovel as the complicity between Rosas and Gorıbar, which repre-sents the ‘‘matrimonio de la Revolucion traidora con el porfirismo’’(72). Their alliance is also indicative of the designs of the leaders ofthe nation who have pitted rural communities and the Churchagainst federal soldiers, while in Mexico City the highest echelonsof political and Church hierarchies are actually in cahoots, theArchbishop entertained at playing cards with the wives of the atheistpoliticians (154).

As members of Ixtepec’s community, the infantilized Rodolfoand his contemptible mother are the real traitors of the town whobenefit economically from the state of terror and hypocritically claimto be its most righteous members. The Gorıbar family represent thelandowning class who remain untouched by the occupation ofIxtepec: their position and wealth allow them to cooperate withRosas instead of fearing him, and they even remain unaffected bythe government prohibition of Church services as they have a chapelin their home. Brutality is used as a means to enforce the social orderand to allow very few to retain extraordinary privileges at theexpense of the rest of the population. Clearly, the peasants, parti-cularly those who seek to organize in order to claim the rights to the


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land that had been promised them in the revolutionary period, feelthe brunt of the burden.30 The narrator suggests that the GuerraCristera was little more than a fabrication meant to repress thediscontented peasants, particularly those who organized and thusposed a threat to the status quo: ‘‘Entre los porfiristas catolicos y losrevolucionarios ateos preparaban la tumba del agrarismo. [ . . . ] LaIglesia y el Gobierno fabricaban una causa para ‘quemar’ a loscampesinos descontentos’’ (154).

The peasants that hang from the trees on the road to Coculaserve as a reminder of Rodolfo’s and Rosas’s authority and aremeant to dissuade anyone from challenging them, particularly thosewho attempt to express their discontent by banding together, be itin agrarian or guerilla organizations or the town’s collective effort tosave the priest and sexton. Everyone in Ixtepec knows that Rodolfois responsible for the worst violence, yet they also understand thathe and his mother simulate respectability only because they canhide behind their impunity. But it also remains true that no onefrom the town ever challenges Rodolfo, thereby passivelyconsenting to his acts of terror and proving that the town’s socialfragmentation renders them particularly vulnerable. In making Juliaand Isabel the scapegoats, the town exonerates the treacherousGorıbars (92).

When the Cristero revolt breaks out (depicted in the second partof the novel), the narrator asks: ‘‘¿Que esperabamos? No lo se, solo seque mi memoria es siempre una interminable espera’’ (157–158).The act of interminable waiting reaffirms the fact that structurallynothing ever changes in Ixtepec, despite chronometric time’sconstant march forward and history’s recording of events forposterity. The town’s people, divided within and among themselves,constantly long for a utopic past renewed in the present or a morerevolutionary forward-thinking nostalgia, yet are caught waitingseemingly 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 Secretarıa 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 Lopategui, El asesi-

nato de Elena Garro (Mexico: Porrua/ Universidad Autonoma del Estado de Morelos,

2005), 96–101.


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Iguala remembered

I turn now to how Los recuerdos can illuminate our thinking aboutthe 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 cyclesof violent repression; the complicity and impunity of reprehensibleauthority figures who impede social cohesion to retain their power;and the notion of forsaken communities. The novel can also enableconsideration of continuities and discontinuities, particularly interms of how violence operates in Guerrero, primarily by describingthe mechanisms and manifestations of structural and culturalviolence. As I have discussed, they have inequality at their core, areexacerbated by impunity and lead to stasis. In contrast to the focuson direct violence that operates in the state, my focus is on keyelements such as impunity, social resistance, and racial discrimina-tion, all of which are paramount in Garro’s fictional project. Anotherarea in which the novel can prove enlightening is the telling ofthe events of Ayotzinapa. Drawing on Garro’s ideas on memory asslippery, social, and yet defining and determining, I ask the ques-tion: what will be remembered of the 43 students of Ayotzinapa?The two reports of the commission of experts, el GrupoInterdisciplinario de Expertos Independientes (GIEI) named by theInter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR), publishedin September, 2015 and April, 2016, respectively, provide evidencethat was missing from initial press coverage of the events and thefederal government’s statements.31 The current federal administra-tion clearly would like the story to be buried as soon as possible andnever remembered.

According to the evidence, on September 26, 2014, a group offorty-seven young men from the Escuela Normal in Ayotzinapa set outfor Iguala in order to procure buses that would transport them toMexico City to participate in the yearly demonstration held tocommemorate the anniversary of the 1968 massacre of students inTlatelolco. The students intended to steal the buses, as they did everyyear, 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 vıctimas,’’ accessed May 27, 2017, http://prensagieiayotzi.

wixsite.com/giei-ayotzinapa/informe-.


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that ensued.32 Unmitigated violence was carried out that night on theyoung men (known pejoratively as the ‘‘Ayotzis’’).33 The secondreport of the GIEI traces several moments of intense brutality, carriedout in nine different parts of Iguala or nearby that night, suggestingthat the attacks were coordinated (II: 5). Six people were executedand more than forty injured (I: 311–312). The whereabouts of the 43disappeared students is still unknown. Federal agencies, includingfederal police forces sighted by witnesses and members of the mili-tary base only meters away from one of the sites of the attack haveremained silent.34 The GIEI concluded in September, 2015, that theoriginal investigation carried out by Mexican authorities had beenmarred by the mishandling, and possible destruction, of keyevidence.35 What remains unclear to the investigators of the GIEI iswhy this year the procuring of the buses would be so heinouslyvindicated. A hypothesis put forth by the commission suggests thatthe 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 ademas 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

Infanterıa who witnessed, photographed, and reported the students’ detention, before

their disappearance. ‘‘Los asuntos militares o de inteligencia son aspectos delicados en

cualquier paıs 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, ası 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

debıa ser investigada. Esta hipotesis es la posibilidad de que dicho autobus podrıa

haber sido un medio de transporte de la heroına que se produce en la zona, lo que

podrıa 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


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The official story claims that members of the criminal organization,‘‘Guerreros Unidos,’’ acting under the instruction of the mayor ofIguala, Jose Luis Abarca Velazquez, and his wife, Marıa de losAngeles Pineda Villa, both of whom were known to be implicatedin the organization, kidnapped, tortured, murdered and incineratedthe students’ bodies in Cocula’s dump, unimpeded by the municipalpolice. Scientific evidence has proven this theory regarding thedisposal 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 whobelieve that:

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

In the days and months after the massacre there was enormousoutrage both in Mexico and abroad, voiced mostly in editorials,online social networks, and public demonstrations that paralyzedMexico City.38 Yet the generalized outcry could do little to curb thefederal government’s position on the massacre. At first this positionwas 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 alreadybeen tampered with. The response to the massacre thus alsoconnects with Garro’s novel with its unclear solutions, a show ofindignation and a demand for accountability that falls on deaf ears.There are obvious links with the episode in Los recuerdos in whichthe madman Juan Carino demands an explanation regardingIgnacio’s murder from Rosas, only to be left waiting all day, as thegeneral had slipped out the back door of the garrison (88). Theirony of this scene is cutting: not only is the town’s ‘‘loco’’ the onlyinhabitant 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 Antropologıa Forense (EAAF), as well as evidence provided by the

UNAM’s Centro de Ciencias de la Atmosfera (283–284), see also Gonzalez Rodrıguez,

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.


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Carino believes himself to be Mexico’s president and in that roledemands justice.

At the outset of the novel, the narrator explains that the momentretrieved from memory to be recounted is one in which the town isemerging from almost two decades of military occupation: first,during the Revolution when the Constitutionalist army and theZapatistas claimed to represent Ixtepec’s best interest but bothpillaged the town, and, later, under the federal army, who purportedto uphold the new constitution and enforce revolutionary policiessuch as agrarian reform, but in effect increased the holdings of theGorıbar family, murdered those who resisted, and kept the townawash in fear.39 During this period, state violence is clearly linkedto nation building. The increased role of the state worked to establishcentralization and hegemony, but certainly didn’t have the interest ofrural populations in mind. The Cristero revolt, which pitted the armyagainst the Church, is a good example that clearly left rural commu-nities worse off.

In the twenty-first century, where neoliberal initiatives sharpenconflicts and broaden gaps between rich and poor, land reform is stillnot resolved, there is limited access to health care and education, andstate violence careens between commission and omission. The post-revolutionary nationalist project and the military have been sidelinedas the federal government seeks to fight networks of organized crimeand to cover tracks that map its collusion. Particular events inGuerrero may offer insights. For example, the southeastern stateseems to be at war with itself.40 The problems that a fragile democ-racy and extreme social injustice have brought about in Mexico ingeneral seem to be exacerbated in Guerrero. These include: the frag-mentation of the social fabric, the lack of governance, the impunityand abuse of power of corrupt officials, an intense military presence,an obsession with greed and simulation, the silencing of activists, andthe extreme vulnerability of the poor.41 What may seem to be cyclesof direct violence may well be the continuity of structural and culturalviolence. 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 Gonzalez Rodrıguez, Los 43, 66–72, 31–32.

41. See Mora, ‘‘Desaparicion forzada,’’ 29–30, Guillermo Trejo, ‘‘La industria

criminal en Mexico,’’ and Gonzalez Rodrıguez, Los 43, 19–56.


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to predict a similar future seems apt: the state of continued injusticeconfirms the very idea of ‘‘recuerdos del porvenir.’’ Political scientist,Guillermo Trejo, has stated something very similar: ‘‘En la masacre deIguala convergen pasado, presente y futuro.’’42 Examining the regionhistorically—or continuously, as Garro would have said—facilitatesthe contextualization of the events of the Ayoztinapa students, andindicates that this is not a random occurrence, but rather an egre-gious example in a catastrophic state of affairs.

The scope of the history of violence in the state of Guerrero isobviously complex, with a long trajectory of lawlessness, with thepoor affected most, while government officials at all levels haveeither turned a blind eye or have engaged directly in criminal activ-ities. As Trejo has noted: ‘‘Aunque el mundo ha cambiado y Mexicoy Guerrero han cambiado, la impunidad es constante.’’43 With itsrole diminished, the neoliberal state has altered its political andethical responsibility to protect its citizens. In this scenario, thenotions of rebellion and resistance, key in Garro’s fiction, arereplaced with the need for resilience that strips individuals andcommunities of advocacy. As Sarah Bracke has shown, in neoliber-alism, rewarding resilience can be a means to silently keep resis-tance to injustice at bay. A key component of the neoliberal culturalproject erases resistance and the imagination and with it any notionof the future.44

Garro’s proposals for resistance in her novel—Ignacio’sdemands, the party, Isabel’s sacrifice, Abacuc—all fail, but they serveto help flush out the particular conflicts that underlie them; long-standing conflicts, such as racism, that undeniably keep Ixtepecdivided. Anthropologist Mariana Mora has noted how there has beenvirtually no discussion of the fact that some of the disappearedstudents were not only from rural communities, but also membersof Mixteco, Talpaneco, Nahua and Huave Indigenous communities.45

The omission is telling in that it suggests that no importance is givento the impact racism and other historical exclusions have on grossviolations of human rights such as those carried out in Iguala in2014.46 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.


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accustomed to extreme marginalization, structural exclusion,discrimination, and acts of unmitigated violence.

The dynamics of social resistance in Guerrero are another keyfactor 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 thathypocrisy, greed and repression have been the order of the day for solong that they have become normalized and are extenuated in a societythat fosters impunity. Accustomed to resistance, the Escuela Normalhas an openly Maoist agenda. The Isidro Burgos Normal forms part ofa project that dates back to the era of Lazaro Cardenas, originallycreated to train young men from the region to be teachers in ruralareas.47 Many of the schools have fallen into decay from underfunding.They have a history of resistance and have produced famous dissi-dents, not least, Lucio Cabanas, leader of the guerrilla group elPartido de los pobres, active in Guerrero in the 1970s.48

There are obvious historical and ideological ties between thenormalistas’ agenda and Zapata’s agrarian revolutionary movement.Zapata figures in Los recuerdos as an insurgent in his fight againstinjustice who endures in characters like Abacuc or Ignacio, yet isunable to transform the stupor of stasis, in which rebels, particularlywhen organized, are crushed. Garro’s novel thus helps explain whythe 43 students were seen as impediments in the vested interestsof the powers that be and thus paid with their lives, much likeIgnacio, the agrarian. I draw on Trejo to describe this further:

Para lograr la hegemonıa local, los grupos del crimen organizado requierende una sociedad desarticulada y aterrorizada, incapaz de cuestionar y deso-bedecer los dictados de las autoridades de facto. [ . . . ] [C]uando las zonasestrategicas para el trasiego y la produccion de droga estan en lugares dondeoperan fuertes movimientos sociales y comunitarios—como Iguala—, losgrupos criminales intentan doblegar a los colectivos sociales mediante lacompra de sus lıderes o mediante la represion selectiva y ejecucionesejemplares. La masacre de los estudiantes normalistas de Ayotzinapa fue unaaccion estrategica y premeditada para sembrar terror y doblegar a los gruposde la sociedad civil que en Iguala [ . . . ] participaban en distintos procesos dearticulacion social.49

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

47. See Tanalıs Padilla, ‘‘Memories of Justice: Rural Normales and the Cardenista

Legacy,’’ in Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos, 32 no.1 (2016): 111–143.

48. Gonzalez Rodrıguez, Los 43, 28–29.

49. Trejo, ‘‘La industria.’’


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that is divided can be more easily manipulated out of their fear ofcrimes that they understand will never be punished.

***

Closing the door on the future

Garro’s novel suggests that change will always be illusive for Ixtepecsince, according to James Mandrell, it ‘‘requires imagination andinsight beyond most people, who are mired in the violence and ennuiof everyday life.’’50 As Garro describes: ‘‘Solo un instante antes demorir descubren que era posible sonar y dibujar el mundo a sumanera’’ (248). Meanwhile, those characters who share insights thatallow them to make sense of the past and to look imaginatively at ‘‘elreves de las cosas’’—Ignacio, Carino, Conchita, Hurtado—areforbidden to speak out, discredited or erased. Imagination alsoproves vital to challenging the official discourse of documentedhistory. I concur with Gladhart when she suggests that, in Losrecuerdos, the official version of written historical accounts is desta-bilized ‘‘and yet, the novel offers no alternative. [ . . . ] Nothingreplaces the dominant version perhaps because, as with individualmemories, 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, beit plural, unreliable, stable or historical. Whichever way, there can beno prospect for Ixtepec. This can be inferred by the fact that none ofthe three Moncada children survive beyond their first ventures intoadult life. Similarly, the forcible disappearance of students must alsobe understood as an attempt to cancel the future. Juvenicidio, a termcoined by Sergio Gonzalez Rodrıguez52 is a means to prolong stag-nation in Guerrero. Ultimately, it is an act that (drawing on GeorgeSteiner) closes the door on the future, thereby leading to a state ofinertia in knowledge and perception, for as he notes: ‘‘There couldbe 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. Gonzalez Rodrıguez, Los 43, 26.

53. George Steiner, After Babel. Aspects of Language and Translation (Oxford:

Oxford University Press: 1992, [1975]), 167.


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the ideal polis of literature, the community that narrative plot holdsout as its lure and its unattainable goal.54 Franco’s reading upholdsthe impossibility of a nostalgic and revolutionary utopian desire andlocks me into interpreting Garro’s novel as turning endlessly on thesame axis. Yet reading the tragedy of Ayotzinapa through the literarylens of Los recuerdos encourages me to question the very act ofwaiting so prevalent in the novel. How long will the families of thedisappeared normalistas have to wait for answers?

Waiting might prove futile in Ixtepec, insofar as the town isforsaken and remains reconciled to wait as the cycles of time tracethemselves over and over endlessly. But waiting can also be tied tohope and this in turn to the future, to the possibility of being andliving otherwise, just as ilusion, the imagination, and language canlay the grounds for another future, much like the one that was deniedthe Moncada children. Words and the imagination challenge thesense of nostalgia that leaves the characters of the novel bewildered.As such, Los recuerdos can encourage readers to reflect not only oninaction, but on the need to overturn injustices: to accept a degree ofaccountability for consenting to the unspeakable crimes committedin Iguala, to remember the victims, to listen and perceive those voicescondemned to silence, and to demand an end to impunity. In spite ofits unquestionable fatalism, Garro’s novel hints at ways in which thesocial fabric of the town might be woven together again shouldstructural and cultural violence be attenuated. Instead of obliteratingdivisive histories, there exist ethical, creative, and political waysof transforming them to improve human lives and relations.Remembrance need not only be of things to come.

54. Jean Franco, Plotting Women, 129.


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