Mexican Literature
Mexico's literature has its antecedents in the literature of the indigenous of Mesoamerica.
With the arrival of the Spanish a new era of the literature was produced in New Spain (Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire). While the native Mexicans developed systems of writing, these were not often used to preserve the literature of these peoples. Most of the myths and literary works of the indigenous peoples of Mexico were transmitted by oral tradition. Some of these productions were permanently fixed by writing them dwn using the Latin alphabet that the missionaries of the 16th century used to transcribe the information they received from the native inhabitants.
The influence of indigenous themes in the literature of New Spain i evident in the incorporation of many terms commonly used in the common local tongue of the people in colonial Mexico as well as some of the topics touched in the works of the period which reflected local views and cultures.
In the 17th century flourished the Baroque Literature. Many of the known authors raided century varying success in the field of literary games, with works like anagrams, emblems and mazes. There were notable authors in poetry, lyric, narrative and drama. The Baroque literature in New Spain followed the rivers of Spanish writers Góngora and Quevedo.
Writers of Independent Mexico (19th century)
Due to the political instability of the 19th century, Mexico—already an independent nation—saw a decline not only in its literature but in the other arts as well. During the 19th century there were three major literary trends: Romanticism, Realism-Naturalism and Modernism.
The inception of the Mexican Revolution favored the geowth of the journalistic genre. Once the civil conflict ended, the theme of the Revolution appeared as a theme in novels, stories and plays , this tendency would anticipate the flowering of a nationalist literature; there also appeared on the scene "indigenous literature" which purposed to depict the life and thought of the indigenous people of Mexico, although, ironically, none of te authors of this movement were indigenous. Until the mid-1940s thre were authors who continued realistic narrative, but also reached their peak the indigenous novel and reflections involved around on self and national culture. In this decade, it began what we call "Contemporary Mexican Novel" incorporating innovative techniques, influences of American and European writers.
Mexican Revolution
The emergence of the Mexican Revolution favored the development of journalistic genre. After the civil conflict finished, the Revolution theme appeared as a theme in many novels, short stories and plays. This trend would be an antecedent for the flowering of 'revolutionary literature', which was embodied in the work of writers like Juan Rulfo. A literature of indigenous themes, which aimed to portray the thoughts and life of the indigenous peoples of Mexico surged along with this revolutionary literature.
During the half of the 20th century, Mexican literature has diversified into themes, styles and genres. These new groups sough for an urban, satirical and rebellious literature; another literary style surged called Infrarrealismo which sought to "blow his brains out of the official culture" and was composed by Carlos Fuentes among others.
Reference
Wikipedia. (2016, May 19). Mexican Literature retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mexican_literature.
About Mexico
Mexico was fro thousands of years a region of competing and advanced Indian civilizations, beginning with the Olmecs and Toltecs and moving on trough many others—the most familiar of which were the Mayns—ending with the last great indigenous Mexican civilization, the Aztecs. Suddenly, and literally overnight, their civilization was swept away by conquistadors from a strange land, and in one of history's great coincidences, an event that was predicted by their own Aztec cosmology and therefore accepted as inevitable.
In one cataclysmic blow, the gods of a thousand years, and the accompanying beliefs and worldviews, were overturned and replaced by the new Catholic God and his emissaries. Mexico became one of the two major centers for Spanish rule and subsequently became the consolidating heart of Spanish power in the Americas. The fruits of this legacy live on today as Mexico, and the rest of the region, continues to struggle with poverty, concentrated wealth, powerful oligarchies, and sometimes unstable, unrepresentative governments.
The government of Mexico today is technically a federal republic, with a president who serves a nonrepeatable six-year term and a bicameral legislature. The 2000 presidential election marked a sea change in the political history of Mexico, being the first time since the Mexican Revolution—the hard-fought battle for independence from Spain—that the candidate from the PRI (the Partido Revolucionario Institucional, or the Institutional Revolutionary Party) lost the presidential election.
Almost all of Mexico is in the North American Plate, and the Tropic of Cancer effectively divides the country into temperate and tropical zones. Mexico is one of the 17 megadiverse countries of the world, ranking first in biodiversity in reptiles, second in mammals and fourth in amphibians.
Reference
Foster, D. (2002). The Global Etiquette Guide to Mexico and Latin America. (pp. 13-37). New York, NY: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Wikipedia. (2016, May 26). Mexico retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mexico
Websites
- The Culture Trip (Mexico)The Culture Trip: the best art, food, culture and travel.
Carlos Fuentes
Carlos Fuentes (1928-2012) was a Mexican novelist, short-story writer, playwright, critic and diplomat whose experimental novels won him an international literary reputation. The son of a Mexican career diplomat, Fuentes was born in Panama and traveled extensively with his family in North and South America and in Europe. He learned English at age four in Washington, D.C. As a young man, he studied law at the University of Mexico in Mexico City and later attended the Institute of Advanced International Studies in Geneva.
Rebelling against his family’s middle-class values early in the 1950s, Fuentes became a communist, but he left the party in 1962 on intellectual grounds while remaining an avowed Marxist. His first novels re-create the past realistically and fantastically; he also treats the theme of national identity and bitterly indicted Mexican society, which won him national prestige. The work is marked by cinematographic techniques, flashbacks, interior monologues, and language from all levels of society, showing influences from many non-Spanish literatures.
Death of Artemio Cruz New Translation by Call Number: PQ7297.F793 M813 1991ISBN: 0374522839Publication Date: 1991As the novel opens, Artemio Cruz, the all-powerful newspaper magnate and land baron, lies confined to his bed and, in dreamlike flashes, recalls the pivotal episodes of his life. Carlos Fuentes manipulates the ensuing kaleidoscope of images with dazzling inventiveness, layering memory upon memory, from Cruz's heroic campaigns during the Mexican Revolution, through his relentless climb from poverty to wealth, to his uneasy death. Perhaps Fuentes's masterpiece, The Death of Artemio Cruz is a haunting voyage into the soul of modern Mexico.
Inez by Call Number: PQ7297.F793 I6713 2002ISBN: 0374175535Publication Date: 2002Two narratives twine through this superb novel: one introduces Gabriel Atlan-Ferrara, a fabled orchestral conductor, and his great passion, Inez Prada, a red-haired Mexican diva; the other is a mysterious telling of the first encounter in human history between a man and a woman. Berlioz's music for The Damnation of Faust brings Gabriel and Inez together, while the emerging love of neh-el and ah-nel--the original lovers--echoes the Faustian pact of love and death. Linking these narratives is a beautiful crystal seal that belongs to Atlan-Ferrara, its meaning an enigma that obsesses him. And like the light refracted through the seal, these stories begin in prehistory and spiral out into infinity. In Inez, we find Carlos Fuentes at the height of his magical and realist powers. This profound and beautiful work confirms his standing as one of the world's pre-eminent novelist.
The Years with Laura Diaz by Call Number: PQ7297.F793 A7613 2001ISBN: 0156007568Publication Date: 2001Carlos Fuentes's hope-filled new novel sees the twentieth century through the eyes of Laura D'az, a woman who becomes as much a part of our history as of the Mexican history she observes and helps to create. Born in 1898, this extraordinary woman grows into a wife and mother, becomes the lover of great men, and, before her death in 1972, is celebrated as a politically committed artist. A complicated and alluring heroine, she lives a happy life despite the tragedies and losses she experiences, for she has borne witness to great changes in her country's life, and she has loved and understood with unflinching honesty.
Reference
Image retrieved from Google Images http://estaticos04.elmundo.es/america/imagenes/2012/07/09/mexico/1341859695_0.jpg
The Editors of Encyclopedia Britannica. (n.d). Carlos Fuentes. Encyclopedia Britannica. Retrieved from http://www.britannica.com/biography/Carlos-Fuentes
Outstanding Authors
Writer and journalist Angeles Mastretta studied journalism at the School of political and Social Sciences of Mexico's National Autonomous University. Mastretta's literary work reveals the feminist Mexican thinking in the 70's and 80's. With an attitude of social commitment to the problems faced by Mexican women, she presents and puts them in context through the tangible and authentic experience, creating some of the most memorable female characters ever captured between the covers of a book.
Angeles Mastretta. (n.d). Retrieved from https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:SrxaKLyue9kJ:https://www.oas.org/en/ser/dia/lecture/speakers/bio%2520ANGELES%2520MASTRETTA%2520ENG.doc+&cd=3&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us
Image retrieved from Google Images http://www.alquiblaweb.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/angeles_mastretta.jpg
Laura Esquivel is a Mexican writer and author. Born on September 30, 1950, in Mexico City, Mexico. Esquivel began writing while working as a kindergarten teacher. She wrote plays for her students and then went on to write children's television programs during the 1970s and 1980s. Esquivel often explores the relationship between men and women in Mexico in her work. She is best known for Like Water for Chocolate (1990), an imaginative and compelling combination of novel and cookbook.
Editors of Biography.com. (2016, June 2). Laura Esquivel Biography. The Biography.com. http://www.biography.com/people/laura-esquivel-185854#profile
Retrieved from Image retrieved from Google Images http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-yiUm_I2wNTw/Uuv5BRWugsI/AAAAAAAADck/BI1H5nkwxbI/s1600/lauraesquivel.jpg
Juan Jose Arreola was a Mexican short-fiction writer and humorist who was a master of brief subgenres, such as short-story, the epigram, and the sketch. As a writer, Arreola;s trademark was his humor, which fluctuated between the witty and the cosmic. He was obsessively drawn to the absurd and enjoyed satirizing modern and technology and its monstrous by-products. He sounds at times like a comical and impudent Kafka. One of Arreola’s fixations was the absurdity of religious belief and what he denounced as God’s unequal relationship to humankind. This is the theme of "El silencio de Dios". ("God's Silence").
Image retrieved from Google Images http://www.24-horas.mx/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/juan_jose_arreola_la_feria_analisis-movil.jpg
Gonzales Echevarria, R. (n.d). Juan Jose Arreola. Encyclopedia Britannica. Retrieved from http://www.britannica.com/biography/Juan-Jose-Arreola
Books
Tear This Heart Out by ISBN: 9781573226028Publication Date: 1997-05-01Tear This Heart Out is the story of a young, beautiful and intelligent Mexican woman married to a dishonest and unfaithful general 15 years her senior. Mastretta reveals secrets and tells spicy gossip en la manera Mexicana (a uniquely Mexican way) with passion and conviction. The story is told in a salacious, wacky, tender, powerful, ironic, terrifying and hilarious way that it makes you think it is a true story.
Like Water for Chocolate by ISBN: 9780385420174Publication Date: 1995Earthy, magical, and utterly charming, this tale of family life in tum-of-the-century Mexico became a best-selling phenomenon with its winning blend of poignant romance and bittersweet wit.
Confabulario and Other Inventions by ISBN: 9780292710306Publication Date: 1964This biting commentary on the follies of mankind by a noted Mexican author cuts deeply yet leaves readers laughing—at themselves as well as at others. With his surgical intelligence, Juan José Arreola exposes the shams and hypocrisies, the false values and vices, the hidden diseases of society. Although some of the pieces have a noticeably Mexican orientation, most of them transcend strictly regional themes to interpret the social scene in aspects common to all civilized cultures. Arreola’s view is not limited; much of his sophistication comes from his broad, deep, and varied knowledge of present and past, and from his almost casual use both of this knowledge and of his insight into its meaning for humanity. His familiarity with many little-known arts and sciences, numerous literatures, history, anthropology, and psychology, and his telling allusions to this rich lode of fact, increase the reader’s delight in his learned but witty, scalding but poetic, satire.
Pedro Paramo by ISBN: 9780802133908Publication Date: 1994Deserted villages of rural Mexico, where images and memories of the past linger like unquiet ghosts, haunted the imaginations of writer Juan Rulfo, his classic novel Pedro Páramo, a dream-like tale that intertwines a man's quest to find his lost father and reclaim his patrimony with the father's obsessive love for a woman who will not be possessed—Susana San Juan.
Adapting Gender by ISBN: 9781438468273Publication Date: 2018-01-01Demonstrates how film adaptations intersect with feminist discourse in neoliberal Mexico.
Fire and Ice by ISBN: 9780807891698Publication Date: 1976-01-01This study presents the poetry of Xavier Villarrutia, analyzing it on several levels. The book moves from the specific to the more abstract, from commentary on lexicon and syntax, through metrics and figurative language, to a consideration of the poet's major themes: love, death, and oppressive solitude. The final section is an evaluation of the place of Villarrutia's poetry, and of the author himself, in both Mexican literature and in the larger Western tradition.
Troubled Memories by ISBN: 9781438471891Publication Date: 2018-10-01Analyzes literary and cultural representations of iconic Mexican women to explore how these reimaginings can undermine or perpetuate gender norms in contemporary Mexico.Versos de la Huasteca by
ISBN: 9786074628661Publication Date: 2017Los versos de la Huasteca fueron recogidos en Tamazunchale, SLP, entre los años 60 y 70 del siglo pasado. El propósito del libro es mostrar la riqueza del folclor de la región a través de lo que se escuchaba en la ciudad mencionada, la cual se describe, con sus usos y costumbres, de manera breve y amena en las páginas introductorias.
Bridges, Borders, and Breaks by ISBN: 9780822964148Publication Date: 2016-06-17This volume reassesses the field of Chicana/o literary studies in light of the rise of Latina/o studies, the recovery of a large body of early literature by Mexican Americans, and the "transnational turn" in American studies. The chapters reveal how "Chicano" defines a literary critical sensibility as well as a political one and show how this view can yield new insights about the status of Mexican Americans, the legacies of colonialism, and the ongoing prospects for social justice. Chicana/o literary representations emerge as significant examples of the local that interrogate globalization's attempts to erase difference. They also highlight how Chicana/o literary studies' interests in racial justice and the minority experience have produced important intersections with new disciplines while also retaining a distinctive character. The recalibration of Chicana/o literary studies in light of these shifts raises important methodological and disciplinary questions, which these chapters address as they introduce the new tools required for the study of Chicana/o literature at this critical juncture.
