María Odette Canivell
Women like you are going to change this country.1
—Angeles Mastretta, Mal de Amores
Carlos Fuentes, the Mexican novelist, essayist, and former diplomat, claims that America was born under the sign of Utopia. Long before its geographical “discovery,” America was created in an “imaginary dream of the utopian search for its cities of gold, its peaceful, joyful island of Utopia …” (Nueva 18).2 By the time explorers had disembarked on the continent, the European imaginary had granted a magical-mythical status to the New World. Anything and everything was feasible in the realm of this Promised Land, a place where “every possible utopia man could imagine could come true” (Olivero 7). Beyond the actual allure of finding gold, land, or spices, the first explorers offered Europe a “vision of the Golden Age restored on earth,” paradise recovered (Espejo 6). Thus, this newly found Atlantis became a site upon which dreams could come true, a reminder of that happy time when humans were still dwelling in the Garden of Eden unencumbered by the trappings of mortal civilization.
For Europeans, tired of war, pestilence, cramped, filthy cities, and, with few exceptions, poor governance, the myth of the Adamic man was only possible in the New World. It was up to the chroniclers of the Americas to promote these myths and make certain their contemporaries believed their fabulous tales. From Colombus’ fantastic descriptions of men with tails of monkeys (whom he punctiliously described in his letters to the Spanish Royal court) to Cortes’ self-serving affirmation that the inhabitants of the Indies were peaceful, loving souls keen on embracing the civilizing influences of Spain, Latin America was born in print as the embodiment of the ideals of perfection Europeans of the time held as true.
Two of the most common topoi in this ingeniously crafted tale were the myths of the “good savage” and the return to paradise. The reality was other. Paradise was destroyed by the European zeal to possess their version of Eden, for, as Fuentes points out ironically, “America was not the first, nor it would be the last, disorientation of the West” (Espejo 5). In spite of being the object of other cultures’ utopian dreams, it was not until after the former Spanish colonies became independent that Latin America formulated its own utopian thought. One should note that the phrase Latin America, employed as a term to define a geographical, political, and historical region sharing a common language (or, rather, common Latin-derived languages), was coined in 1857 by the Colombian José María Torres Caicedo in his poem Las dos Américas. The region’s home-born utopias, thus, had to wait until the Latin Americans found a sense of self after fighting the colonial powers for independence. Accordingly, when speaking about the Latin American utopian imaginary, two clearly identified camps emerge: utopias for Latin America and utopias of Latin America.
The first takes root in the imported millenary dreams brought to America beginning in 1492, when the unexplored continent became a medium to implement the imaginary desires of Europe’s failed utopias. These Western-civilization-originated idealizations of a return to Eden were transformed, in the New World, into dystopian nightmares, destroyed by the colonial powers who turned the native American population into victims of exploitation, stealing their lands, trampling indigenous cultures, and fragmenting their sense of self. As Fuentes claims, as a result of the failure of its colonial past, “the American landmass stands perched between dream and reality, living the consequences of a divorce between the aspirations of the ideal society they want to create and the imperfect social model they actually inhabit” (Espejo 6). The second type of utopias for the region, the utopias of Latin America, are defined by the Cuban philosopher Yohanka del Rio as Latin America’s social and political thought determined by the consciousness of the Latin Americans and formulated to suit the needs of its citizens. In this second type of utopian thought, Latin American authors and political thinkers try to recreate a new ideal reality to accommodate the political and social needs of their countrymen. A distinctive trait in this category, del Río continues, is the tight relationship between the social and political context and the utopia itself. As examples, one may cite the Bolivarian dream of a united Latin America, the “indigenista” movement of Chiapas, Tupac Amaru’s uprising, Sandino’s “Movimiento campesino,” as well as the Sandinista and Mexican Revolutions.3
This last example is a particularly poignant case. The revolutionary ideals of the Mexican people represented (in the revolution’s beginning stages) the utopian dream of the country looking forward to shedding the chains of tyranny. Most of their goals, hopes, and aspirations were quickly dashed. In a conflict lasting close to twenty years, the revolutionary leaders betrayed the confidence of their people and the principles they initially espoused, and killed (metaphorically and literally) the possibility of a strong, well-governed nation. The Mexican Revolution is a perfect paradigm of the “American anti-utopia,” a dystopia characterized by “projecting as the future something already experimented in the past” (Cerutti 17). When the Mexican political elite discarded México’s natural human talent (setting their political sights on Europe instead) and co-opted the failed models of other European revolutions as templates for their own national project, the failure of the political class to solve their social and political problems in situ provided the conditions for a dystopian future.4
Unlike the United States or Europe, where there is a clear, traceable dystopian literary tradition (particularly evident in the production of novels), Latin American writers are not as invested in writing about imagined apocalyptic scenarios, for the region suffers from real (rather than designed) and chronic nightmarish conditions: civil wars, despotic governments, ecological disasters…. On the contrary, while there is a clear utopian tradition beginning after independence (some of it, which although homegrown, is situated within the utopias for Latin America), exemplified in Domingo Sarmientos’ Argiropolis and José Enrique Rodó’s essay Ariel, the circulation of dystopian literature has been rather limited. Dystopian visions find fertile ground in industrial and post-industrial capitalists nations; they are not as common in communities where the rural encroaches on urban living, but whose main economic means of production is founded on other non-industrial revenue.
In “the South,”5 writing history masked as fiction has been the more popular instrument of social analysis, as “novelists share the notion that, through fiction, history becomes humanized” (Borland 439), thus becoming more accessible to the reader. Still, there is a minor tradition of literary dystopias, mainly present in the genres of the novel, the short story, and plays. Among these early Latin American examples one should cite Adolfo Bioy Casares’ La Invención de Morel (1940), a novella with clear parallels to H.G. Well’s The Island of Dr. Moreau. Likewise, some of Jorge Luis Borges’ short stories, particularly those included in The Garden of Forking Paths (1941) and Fictions (1944), and Alejo Carpentier’s The Lost Steps6 feature common dystopian motifs. Among female authors, Gioconda Belli’s Waslala: A Memorial of the Future (1994) is model of a dystopian novel with an ecological message. In the Country of Women (2010), by the same author, can be also considered an anti-utopia. This last work, though, is tempered by a sense of humour (taken straight from Lysistrata) and a tongue-in-cheek attitude toward the ills befalling Latin American countries. Lastly, aspects of Nelida Piñón’s The Republic of Dreams (1989) and Rosario Ferré’s The House on the Lagoon (1996), two contemporary female-authored works, share with Belli a dystopian bent.7
Instead of the conventional apocalyptic, future-set dystopian novels, the region boasts a wide variety of utopias, which almost unfailingly turn into catastrophic failures (becoming anti-utopias in the process). Novels about them abound, as the writers in Latin America document their rise and fall systematically. Gabriel García Márquez’s The General in his Labyrinth (1989), for example, details the botched implementation of one of the region’s most famous, innovative, and homegrown utopian dreams: Bolivar’s invention of a Great Latin America from Tierra del Fuego to the far North (at one point, the Venezuelan Libertador was planning to include all of the North, meaning the United States and Canada, in his dream of the “gran America”).8 The War of the End of the World (1981), by the Peruvian Nobel Prize–winner Mario Vargas Llosa, may serve to shed light on why Latin American traditional dystopian novels are few and far between. Although the title of the novel conjures visions of an apocalyptic future, the lengthy narrative is a retelling of the War of the Canudos, a conflict describing the uprising of one of the millenary nineteenth-century religious sects. This ragtag army of fanatics held the Brazilian state hostage, after defeating the army in several high-profile battles, while proclaiming the end of the world from the walls of their fortified city in the middle of the jungle. In Latin America, oftentimes, reality is more fantastic than what the imagination can dream of. Dystopias, in consequence, are actually real.9
In a world where a nightmarish reality trumps any fantasy the mind can conjure, it is not unusual to find writers using real events to depict a world readers might believe to be imagined, but is, unfortunately, all too true. Mal de Amores, the 1995 novel by Angeles Mastretta, does precisely that. Referring to a real-life event (the Mexican Revolution), the Mexican novelist tells the story of a long descent into hell, one lasting close to twenty years. Like Vargas Llosa, García Márquez, or Belli, Mastretta voices a desire to deploy fiction as a conduit to analyze and discuss historical events as well as a plea to make things right—for in Latin America writers engage in nation building through their fiction while bemoaning the death of the national (and pan-national) unity Bolivar dreamt of.10 Speaking of Colombia, but reflecting a sentiment that can certainly be applied to any other Latin American nation, Bolivar, the Venezuelan-born caudillo, cries on his deathbed, “the only ideas that occur to Colombians is how to divide the nation” (García Márquez, General 152). The history of the revolutions and internal conflicts in the region leading to civil war certainly supports Bolivar’s complaint (Sendero Luminoso in Perú, the Mexican Revolution, the Cristero conflict, and the Zapatistas in México are just a few examples).11
A need to take the nation to task for the mistakes of the past is undoubtedly present in Mastretta’s novel. Rewriting the history of her country using as a subject a period fraught with internal division, civil war, lies, and shattered dreams does not strike her readers as a coincidence, particularly coming after the NAFTA agreements and the Zapatista uprising. Challenging the conventional male point of view of the “first” Revolution in Mal de Amores, the Mexican novelist offers a new understanding of the events surrounding one of the first utopias of Latin America. Going back in time from the turbulent decades of the 1990s in México, when conditions similar to the beginning years of the Mexican Revolution were developing, the author analyzes the revolutionary project from the perspective of women, for whom this failed utopia becomes a true dystopian nightmare. Understanding what went wrong in the Revolution, the author offers, may shed light on what is happening in the Mexican nation of the now.12
The 1990s in México were turbulent, to say the least. In the south, the predominantly indigenous ELZN army initiated a military offensive to reclaim the use of ancestral land and political autonomy. Taking their name from Emiliano Zapata, a Mexican revolutionary leader, the Zapatistas threatened to overthrow the elected government and replace it with a socialist regime. As its name implies, the ruling PRI (Partido Revolucionario Institucional) had held power in the Mexican nation since the Revolution ended. Although claiming to espouse revolutionary ideals, the country had a level of corruption that was exceptional. Instead of a trickle-down policy, the wealth was trickling up, benefiting only the political elite. Cronyism, nepotism, a general ineptitude, and a customary misspending associated with the pre-electorate year (a ploy every PRI predecessor president had used so that voters could believe, once more, the party’s “revolutionary” message) led to a financial crisis. Foreign investors, fearing another Cuba or, worse, Vietnam, pulled their money out. Local investors, in the wake of NAFTA, fretted about their competitive edge, opting to veto reinvestment of monies earned in the country and new job creation. The Mexican treasury decided not to float the Mexican peso, and was financially strapped for cash; after the forerunner in the race for president, Luis Donaldo Colosio, was assassinated (presumably on the orders of the PRI president, Carlos Salinas de Gortari, who feared he would be tried for corruption if Colosio won) a crisis of confidence damaged the banking system, causing a run on the already depleted funds of the central bank reserves. For many Mexicans, nightmarish scenarios of a second “revolution” plagued their dreams. Manifestations of social unrest and economic turmoil brought home the lesson squandered in the Mexican Revolution: seventy something years later, nothing had really changed in the nation. Writers, artists, and political theorists embraced and extolled the virtues of the Zapatistas, who seemed to offer an alternative to what many believed was the bloated corpse of the PRI. The parallels between the Zapatista uprising and the Mexican Revolution have been widely studied, but, whereas the former was at least marginally successful in terms of reminding Mexicans about due democratic process, the latter’s legacy is still questionable.13
The Mexican revolutionary uprising was too ambitious a project. The attempt to fuse into one the somewhat liberal ideas of the bourgeoisie, the just claims of the “campesino movement,” the suffragist agenda of women, the values of the conservative party, and the demands of the Church was clearly utopian. With so many cooks stirring the pot, their political and social agendas were doomed to fail. As Ramón García Resendíz claims, the Mexican Revolution might have functioned as a foundational myth of the Mexican political regime for close to sixty years, an “image of domination which the regime based its political power on, as a way to legitimize their political agenda” (144); social and political changes, however, were too little and too late coming to the nation, and the legacy of the Revolution was tainted, as the Zapatista uprising in Chiapas, at the end of the twentieth century, would prove.
Literature about the shortcomings of this failed political project abounds in México. From Mariano Azuela’s early account, Los de Abajo (1915), to Carlos Fuentes’ seminal La Muerte de Artemio Cruz (1962), Mexican literature and film has devoted many pages to debunking the myth. Until recently, however, the role of women in the conflict had seldom been studied.14 For Mastretta, as a feminist and a woman, the opportunity to remedy that was hard to ignore. For the first time in their history, the Mexican Revolution offered women a change in political and social mores. Women from all walks of life embraced the promised myth of equality. Myths, though, tend to be imbued with a magical/mystical patina which, sooner or later, loses its sheen. That was the case for the women of México in the early stages of the twentieth century. As combatants in the Mexican Revolution, they supported practically every faction in the new governments (there were too many to count in the first thirty years of the twentieth century), hoping their shed blood and collective suffering would win them equal rights. These early female pioneers also sought to foster the optimal conditions necessary to bring about cultural change, hoping their newly elected politicians would desist in their belief that the primordial role for Mexican daughters was to the become the mirror image of the Virgen de Guadalupe, the sainted “mother of México.”
The concept of womanhood in México is a multi-faceted proposition. The Mother/whore duality is deeply ingrained idea in the Mexican psyche, as it is reinforced (or so it is believed) by alleged historical roots.15 The notion that the birth of the nation is a product of rape (the malinchismo, explored by Paz) makes it difficult for women to successfully implement a feminist agenda. The trope of the “chingada nación mexicana” is a “feminine stereotype central to Mexican constructs of femininity,” thus the women of México are, at the same time, victims of rape and willing enablers of their seducers/rapists (Finnegan). As a result, the nation is metaphorically doubly “chingada.” On the one hand, México suffers the actual physical rape of Malinche, the mother of the first Mexican citizen; on the other, the country is “fucked” by the alleged complicity of the women (and the nation) in its own victimization.16
Even without the “help” of the willing fallen woman archetype present in the collective Mexican imaginary, the daughters of the Mexican Revolution found it extremely difficult to reclaim their rightful place in society, for, as Nikki Craske notes, the political environment for women at the beginning of the twentieth century in México was rife with ambiguities and ambivalence. In the early 1900s, just as the forces of change were blowing over the Mexican nation, women were unable to reap their rewards. Females were placed in a twilight state where, in spite of avowed promises to the contrary, they became disenfranchised, marginalized second-class citizens who were denied many of the rights the nation afforded others. The reason for this state of affairs, Craske suggests, was that “women were being seen more as a threat to the national revolutionary project, rather than supporters and potential beneficiaries. The antipathy of revolutionary men towards women’s full citizenship was despite the participation of women in the revolutionary cause” (122). In the years after the Revolution, the vital part played by women in this long-lasting armed conflict was, for the most part, buried. It is only recently that historians have been trying to highlight their contributions to the cause. The true role of the soldaderas, who fought in armed combat, and the achievements of the intellectual agents of the Revolution, such as Dolores Jimenez y Muro, Hermila Galindo, Elvia Carrillo Puerto (known as the Red Nun), and Juana Belén Gutierrez de Mendoza (to name just a few), was largely unknown. The novelas de la revolución, for example, a genre showcasing the recent history of México through the deeds of their male protagonists, had virtually no female leads.17
Choosing to highlight (or rather rescue from the mists of memory) the role of Mexican women during this vital historical period, and belying the conventional belief that “women are not part of the narrative of nationhood” (Thornton 217), the new feminist Mexican narrative (and, by extension, the Latin American one, Belli and Ferré, for example) has lent a voice to the oppressed, those whose achievements in the historiography of the nation have been silenced. Mal de Amores does precisely that. In subverting the traditional genre of the novela de la revolución, Mastretta creates a fascinating female revolutionary character, a woman torn between two loves, the maderista Daniel Cuenca and the conservative Antonio Zavalza. The book (for which the author received the prestigious prize Rómulo Gallegos) uses the lives of its fictional female character to explore dystopias and utopias in the México of the beginning of the twentieth century.
Following the traditional convention of the novela rosa (romance novels of a kind), Mastretta imagines a protagonist who is intelligent, extremely well educated, wealthy, beautiful, and talented. Emilia is no ordinary romance novel character, for she oversteps the boundaries of the conventional heroine of the culebrón. She is a doctor, a feminist, and a freedom fighter, travelling through war-torn México with her revolutionary lover. Subverting the stereotypes women occupy in female-led narratives, Mastretta creates a “dissident subject,” someone deeply rooted “in the social and ideological contradiction of the affected nation” who represents the counter-discourse of the Mexican Revolution (Medeiro Lichens 300–301).18 Although love plays a central role in the narrative, the protagonist experiences armed combat and sees first-hand the poverty and oppression her fellow women suffer.
Both as a political project and as the cause of the disagreements between Daniel and Emilia regarding the social roles women should play, the Revolution’s ostensible goals grow uncertain, for women are required to be the stable centre to which their husbands return home and, at the same time, occupy the roles they vacate in war safeguarding/rebuilding the Mexican nation (Thornton 225). The daughters of México are torn between different personae, stereotypes created by the patriarchy based on the chingada nación Mexicana archetype. The unwitting females, in this masculine imaginary, alternate between two different submissive roles: playing the part of the Virgen de Guadalupe and that of the slave/seducer/rape victim/mother of the Mexican nation, Malinche. In such a complex cultural environment for women, the Revolution becomes an ontological impossibility: on the one hand, because it created a social environment where chaos and lawlessness reigned unchecked as, during that particular time in Mexican history, laws “were kept in a drawer, waiting to be introduced in a far distant future” (Mastretta 224)19 and on the other, because in such a lawless universe the rights of women were swept under the rug even more, paradoxically, than in the previous despotic regime of Porfirio Díaz.20 Tomis Kapitan claims that a dystopia may be defined as “an isolated society embodying the maximum amount of contentment and harmony, but dramatically short on justice” (268). For the women of the former Tenochtitlan, the Revolution evolves into being just that: the promise of contentment and harmony pales before the reality of injustice and isolation.
More than a historical recreation of an extremely challenging period in Mexican history, though, the novel is a literary paradigm, which the author uses to introduce a conundrum. The Mexican Revolution is at once the symbol of a utopian dream and a dystopian reality reproducing, in the future, the mistakes of the past. In the beginning years, the revolutionary uprising was seen as the vehicle for removing over thirty years of tyranny as well as the tool for creating the foundations of a modern Latin American state. For the Mexican people, the Revolution signified México’s reinsertion into the community of nations, the restoration of much needed democratic values, a social revolution, and equality for every citizen. This dream, however, was never to be fulfilled, for the ghost of war prevented any and all social changes.
Eventually, the fantasy became a living dystopia, particularly for women. Judy Maloof suggests that in the social Mexican imaginary the discourse of the Revolution was one of the master narratives fundamental to the construction of the nation (36). As a discourse, however, it became empty rhetoric, words bandied about by the different factions fighting the Revolution, who used promises as an enticement to get new recruits as cannon fodder. In Mal de Amores, Milagros, Emilia Sauri’s aunt, is one of the first to offer to die for the revolution. As the government forces attack the revolutionary anti-election leaders in Puebla, Emilia, Josefa, and Milagros sit anxiously awaiting the news: “We should be there. Dying with them,” Milagros states, to which her brother-in-law, Emilia’s father, replies, “an absolute prohibition against killing a fellow human being should be the drastic principle of any coherent ethical code” (Mastretta 155–56). In Mal de Amores, the female protagonists take on the role traditionally associated with men, fighters willing to die for a cause, while Diego Sauri and Antonio Zavalza are seen as the peacemakers, a role usually associated with women.
Although there is a clear feminist agenda in Mal de Amores, Mastretta goes beyond subverting the traditional roles assigned to women to engage in nation building from the perspective of her female characters. Writing from the decade of the 1990s, when many of the ills befalling México were seen to be a revisiting of the Revolution’s unsolved issues, Mastretta joined others who wondered if the Zapatistas were not the “new revolution,” an opportunity to fulfill the nation’s dream. Emilia, as Thornton notes, gets her name from Rousseau’s Émile. Like him, she symbolizes an emergent “ideal citizen,” a prototype of the hero who engages in healing the nation rather than killing it, and is seen as the possibility of a promising future for México. The impediment to fulfilling this personal/national destiny is the Revolution itself, for many saw the uprising as a portent of doom; “they have unleashed a tiger” (Mastretta 161), Diego Sauri confesses, and once uncaged, the wild beast can only bring pain to its people.
The relationship between the Mexicans and their turn-of-the-century Revolution, Niamh Thornton argues, parallels that of the literary characters Emilia and Daniel: they are unabashedly attracted to its/his glitter, its/his beautiful possibilities, the alluring beauty of its/his message; in the end, however, the Revolution fails, like the “aventurero Daniel,” traipsing around México leaving chaos in its wake, and all that remains are people (and Emilia herself) seeing empty promises and uncertain futures. In an echo of the Zapatista uprising, Daniel/the Revolution is the object of desire for both the female protagonist and the Mexican nation. Yet unlike the Chiapas movement, which did bring about social change and a reawakening of the nation’s desire for a true democratic process, the Mexican Revolution fails in that endeavour, for “Emilia/the people are bound to him/it, but they are also the ones who suffer and must recoup the damages” (Thornton 224).
In a prescient moment, one of the secondary characters in Mal de Amores, a penniless Spanish encyclopedia peddler who arrives in México seduced by the promissory rhetoric of its politician to sell knowledge to the masses, tells Daniel, “you are chasing illusions,” to which Emilia replies “he is [sic] been chasing illusions as long as I’ve known him” (Mastretta 260).21 Parallel to the protagonists of the story, the Mexican people pursued the illusion of a better country, a better world, knowing deep in their hearts that these seemingly impossible dreams might have come true were it not for the internal incongruities (and contradictions) of the Revolution and the infighting derived from the factions wrestling for political power. The problem, Mastretta argues, is that although periods of upheaval may become the optimal time to bring about change and initiate new programs and innovative ideas, “lots of times revolutions change very little” (qtd. in Mujica). Diego Sauri, Emilia’s visionary father, summarizes the authorial viewpoint: “the irony is that instead of democracy we got chaos, instead of justice, executioners” (Mastretta 268).
Just as America “was the lover one must change through violence in order to make it the perfect object of desire of the European mind” (Cerutti 11), México, during the Revolution, becomes the defiled victim, ravaged by one side or the other, who would rather see the nation dead than share the spoils. Emilia is the innocent onlooker, trying to make sense of this desecration. Travelling the country by train, she witnesses the hell her nation is suffering. Revolutions are shit, she quips, to her lover, feeling powerless to stop the madness. Inverting the utopian trope of a long journey to find paradise, Mastretta describes, through the eyes of her protagonist, a dystopian descent: the desolate countryside filled with the dead and dying, the “experience of the horror that becomes routine” (233), and the children, helpless victims to this hell on earth:
So much horror filled [Emilia’s] eyes those days that for a long time afterward she was afraid to close them and find herself again at the whim of war…. The train filed past a long row of hanged men, their tongues lolling out, and she hugged Daniel trying to exorcise those distorted faces, the picture of a child trying to reach the boots of his father high overhead, the doubled over body of a keening woman, the immutable trees, one after another, each with its dead man like a unique fruit in this landscape. (233–34)
Watching the pain and suffering of her people, Emilia yearns for a new country, a place where women heal, not murder, and the children need not go sick or hungry. As Carmen Rivera Villegas claims, in Mal de Amores Mastretta explores the “ideological and emotional Other of a woman who lives with a revolutionary hero who will not accept her right to a voice in the Revolution” (40). Had that voice been heard, children might have had a better future and the many factions fighting for power may have sat down with each other and tried to reconcile. In the impossibility of participating (politically) in the “big Revolution,” Emilia and the women surrounding her (Milagros, Josefa, Dolores) are “practicing their own revolution” (Mastretta 42), changing what they can with the little support they obtain. From a hospital where holistic medicine is practised and taught to the women (Emilia), to political soirees where free love is chosen over marriage (Milagros), the female protagonists of Mal de Amores create, in the private space, that which the public space denies them. Although Josefa and Dolores represent somewhat more conventional views of womanhood, both are exceptionally strong female characters. The former rules the Sauri family; her husband, Diego, agrees that she acts as the pater familias. The latter teaches Emilia how to cope in a world of men with absent male figures. After spending time in the village with the “dark-skinned, doe-eyed women,” Emilia learns “to get along on her own, to stifle what was irrelevant, to hum to herself, to mock the war, and to grapple with fate the way a plant grapples with water” (191). Living in this indigenous community of stoic, dignified women, whose understated demeanour and scarcity of material means make most people ignore them, teaches the protagonist how to address the arbitrary dictates of the patriarchal hegemony. But her time in the wealth-deprived village also helps as a way to become tutored about female empowerment and how to reconcile love and politics.
A central aspect to the novel, Rivera Villegas claims, is the binary opposition between physical love and the love for (and of) the nation. The two men in Emilia Sauri’s life serve as paradigms representing the nation’s paradoxical relationship with its women. Although a maderista by conviction, Daniel embodies the intrinsic inconsistency of a political project that while espousing (in principle) equal opportunities for women does so from a patriarchal point of view, thus hindering the intellectual, spiritual, and physical development of its members. In contrast, despite apparently conservative political views, Zavalza represents the “utopia of the intellectual maderista women” (Rivera 43) and promotes equal rights for both sexes. Emilia is caught in the middle. Just as she loves her country of birth and the ideals of the Revolution, Emilia loves Daniel and the political message he endorses. Like the Mexican people, however, she becomes disillusioned with the end result: a future where women are marginalized, their contributions ignored, their achievements buried.
Situating the novel in the revolutionary time, the author’s very modern Sauri family nonetheless “provides a model for contemporary Mexican society” (Seminet 663), particularly that of the post-NAFTA era invested in creating a more democratic, modern Mexican nation. Establishing the parallels between the traditional national family (exemplified in the novel by Emilia’s friend Sol) and juxtaposing it with the very unconventional Sauris, Mastretta creates a paradigm of a possible “different” type of Mexican family unit: the ideal, the Sauris, and the real, the actual Mexican family. In that sense, both families represent what Fuentes argued Latin American utopian thought to be: the struggle between the ideal society Latin Americans want to build and the real nightmares they have constructed, for both, real/ideal society and real/ideal family, are suffering from what Seminet terms the “lovesick malaise.”
Although the name of the book stems from a Mexican bolero song (following the convention set in her first novel, Arráncame la vida, named after another love ballad), the title foreshadows the position of the story: a chronicle of the illness that afflicts México and Emilia, deep-rooted melancholia. This unhappiness (desaliento),22 a product of the unrequited love for something (a country) or someone (Daniel), rules them in such a way that just being becomes unbearable; fickle, capricious, and untrustworthy as they may be, Emilia and México’s lovers are still alluring, desirable, and worth fighting for. The only way to heal Emilia’s/the country’s heart is to rewrite the past using a different viewpoint: that of the women who were left behind in the failed revolutionary project. Restoring the Mexican nation to a “natural state” (one of the original utopias for Latin America), where the values the Revolution has left by the wayside are returned, will serve as a balm for the wounded heart of the nation/Emilia. Regrettably, as Georgia Seminet argues, the Revolution did not “give way to a democratic society and México continued to be ruled by authoritarian paternalistic leaders,” corrupt, selfish politicians who fought tooth and nail to misrepresent what the country needed, and misruled for, what seemed to women, an eternity, using the legacy of this dystopia as their banner. The Mexican people, then, represented in fiction by the Sauri family, give voice to those “whose aspirations for democracy and peace distance them from the ‘weight’ and sickness of México’s past.” Lending words to their cry, Mal de Amores becomes “an exorcism of this sickness, focusing on the reconstruction of Mexican subjectivity, especially women’s subjectivity” (663).
The Guatemalan Altiplano indigenous people have a tradition that comes from pre-Columbian times. In times of turmoil, or when something ails them, these Maya descendants conjure the “worry dolls,” a small family of papier-maché figures made by hand. According to the local lore, if you tell these magical figurines your worries and place them under your pillow at night after confiding in them, when you wake up the next morning the magical family will have taken away your fears.23 In the same fashion that the Guatemalan people might purge their demons (literal and figurative), Mastretta uses the written word to exorcise her (and other women’s) fears. Creating an alternate story/history of the Mexican Revolution serves two purposes. In the first place, it is a way to summon the past so that the ghosts of violence and injustice can be conjured and disallowed. Second, it is a way to generate a new discourse in which women are active participants and can thus reclaim/reinvent the hope for a new future.
1 “Las mujeres como tú van a cambiar este país” (89). Translations are mine unless otherwise noted.
2 Carlos Fuentes refers in this quotation to “America” the continent. Latin Americans also consider themselves “Americans,” not in the sense of citizens of the United State of America (who name themselves Americans), but as members of the entire multinational continent.
3 For more information on Latin American utopias, see Yohanka del Rio.
4 It could be appropriate, in this part of the chapter, to situate it by speaking about “formal” literature regarding Latin American dystopias and to discuss how the region sees itself vis-à-vis dystopian theorists from other traditions. By formal I mean theoretical works, rather than literary dystopias (i.e., novels, poem, etc.). I have taken a different route for, mainly, methodological reasons. As the Argentinean scholar Horacio Cerutti suggests in his seminal work Posibilidad, necesidad y sentido de una filosofía latinoamericana, when speaking about Latin America it is necessary to “situate” or remain metaphorically attached to Latin America’s thoughts, works, and literary output. The Latin American intellectual whose “intellectual production” remains vested in the “First World” demonstrates his/her historical disorientation and the absence of a situational positioning, foregoing the possibility of claiming roots within the region. In a sense, Ceruttti reinforces Fuentes’ assertion that America was not the last disorientation of the Western civilization (i.e., the First World). Our scientists, intellectuals, and thinkers (a category to which I belong) are educated within a First World context, studying its philosophies, ethics, and literary works. In that sense alone, we certainly share that “disorientation” Carlos Fuentes accuses the colonial powers of. Discussing one of the “utopias of Latin America,” such as the Mexican Revolution, from within that First World theoretical framework implies a certain epistemological disconnection, particularly when Latin American utopian thought claims a deeper connection to the Latin American homegrown political and social needs, as well as a firm grounding in the praxis. The task Latin American intellectuals, artists, and writers have at hand is to avoid being/writing/situating ourselves within the Others’ (in this case the Others are the First World writers and theorists) tradition and to reject the passive role of being the topoi of other people’s utopias, for Latin Americans need to “create and postulate our own Caliban Latin American utopia, based on a Latin American philosophy and to give birth to a new America, the homeland of a new justice” (Cerutti 22).
The notion of a “Caliban” Latin America is taken from the Cuban critic Roberto Fernandez Retamar, who takes one of the early utopian Latin American works, Ariel, and subverts its original meaning. In Ariel, Rodó proposes a return to an aristocracy of the spirit, counterposing it to the “Calibanian utilitarianism” and materialistic world represented by the United States. Ariel becomes thus the spirit of culture, refinement, and individualism; this individualism, however, is not based in the search for happiness (in this case a synonym for money), but rather in the universal values of culture as reflected in the arts, literature, and a cultivation of the spirit (reminiscent of the German geist). Retamar, in contrast to Rodó, chooses as his symbol Caliban, but reworks the metaphor to rescue the “savage” from the hands of American imperialism. Caliban becomes the embodiment of the mestizo Latin American culture, a culture born of syncretism, which, even though it inherits the language from the colonial powers, uses it to curse his colonizers. As I discuss earlier in the chapter, the utopias of Latin America (unlike the utopias for Latin America) certainly reflect both Retamar and Cerutti’s intent.
To close this long footnote, I believe Gabriel García Márquez summarizes best the sentiments of most Latin Americans regarding this matter. In his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, the Colombian writer states: “Poets and beggars, musicians and prophets, warriors and scoundrels, all creatures of that unbridled reality, we have had to ask but little of imagination, for our crucial problem has been a lack of conventional means to render our lives believable. This, my friends, is the crux of our solitude. And if these difficulties, whose essence we share, hinder us, it is understandable that the rational talents on this side of the world, exalted in the contemplation of their own cultures, should have found themselves without valid means to interpret us. It is only natural that they insist on measuring us with the yardstick that they use for themselves, forgetting that the ravages of life are not the same for all, and that the quest of our own identity is just as arduous and bloody for us as it was for them. The interpretation of our reality through patterns not our own, serves only to make us ever more unknown, ever less free, ever more solitary” (italics mine).
For further views, please see Jose Enrique Rodó, Ariel, and Roberto Fernandez Retamar’s “Caliban Apuntes sobre la cultura de nuestra América.”
5 The “South” is a concept coined by the late Uruguayan poet Mario Benedetti. Trying to find a way to distinguish the poor, non-capitalist, Third World countries from their more powerful neighbours, Benedetti plays with the geographical “name” of South in an attempt to unite in one the non-industrial, non-aligned, Third World countries, pitting them against the North (industrial, capitalist, First World, aligned Colonial powers). He does not, then, refer exclusively to Latin America and the geographical South, but rather the symbolic Third World versus First World, ex-empires versus colonies, and everything else these two last categories imply.
6 I am thinking here in particular of “The Circular Ruins,” “The Library of Babel,” and “The Lottery of Babylon.” The imaginary planet/continent/country featured in the short story “Tlön, Ukbar and Orbius Tertius” is found to be a utopian attempt with some dystopian elements included. I should also mention that Borges’ fiction has been included in every possible genre from “early magical realism” to speculative fiction. His fiction does defy any attempt at classification.
7 Although it may be argued that anti-utopias are forms of dystopias, the term anti-utopia is not used here as a synonym of dystopia, but rather in a slightly different sense. Because the utopias of Latin America are grounded in the praxis, when they go wrong they become “anti-utopias” in the sense that they are the antithesis of everything the utopia stood for in the first place.
8 See María Odette Canivell’s “Of Utopias, Labyrinths and Unfulfilled Dreams in The General in His Labyrinth.”
9 The origin of the “real maravilloso,” which evolved into the magical realism Boom, was the ontological impossibility of hailing from a land where the real is fantastic and the fantastic real. Alejo Carpentier suggests that Latin America is a region forged in magic. When the Conquistador of Mexico, Hernán Cortés, was asked to describe to the Spanish emperor the wonders of the New World the soldier replied: “As I do not know what to call these things, I cannot express them” (qtd. in Carpentier 107). Like him, the men and women who came to populate these new lands were baffled by their limited ability to describe what they experienced. The “old language” they had grown up with was insufficient to articulate the new events they were witness to. The struggle of Latin American writers, since then, has been to find that magic language that can account for a reality that cannot be explained in terms of rationalism.
10 Although some Latin American writers like Guillermo Cabrera Infante have issues with the “construct” Latin America and disagree with the Bolivarian dream of one united America (speaking Spanish, obviously), the trope is revisited constantly, from Hugo Chavez’s rants about “the Latin American sisterhood” (hermandad latinoamericana) to the Rodós essays I have mentioned before. See also Pablo Neruda, Canto general; Mario Benedetti, El Sur también existe; Gabriel García Márquez, The General in his Labyrinth.
11 For Latin-American intellectuals, writers using novels as a block toward nation building, see María Odette Canivell, “El poder de la pluma: los intelectuales latinoamericanos y la política.”
12 For more information regarding this issue, see Nikki Craske, “Ambiguities and Ambivalences in Making the Nation: Women and Politics in 20th-Century México.”
13 It is important to remember that the Zapatistas’ call to arms came immediately after México signed NAFTA. One of their most important contributions was to force the nation to debate whether aligning itself with an “imperial power” was a good idea. Although this is more a theoretical approach to the Zapatista platform, for the parallels to the Mexican revolutionary process and the Zapatista uprising, particularly the way in which Comandante Marcos co-opts Zapata’s message, see Walter Mignolo, “The Zapatista’s Theoretical Revolution: Its Historical, Ethical and Political Consequences.”
14 An exception is Las Manos de Mamá, by Nellie Campobello (1937).
15 The trope of the “chingada nación mexicana” is derived from the work of the Mexican essayist Octavio Paz. See Octavio Paz, The Labyrinth of Solitude; consider also, although to a lesser extent, Carlos Fuentes’ El Espejo enterrado.
16 The fucked Mexican nation. Malinche, as the first mother of the Mexican mestizo, was “fucked” by Cortés, to whom she was given as tribute. Thus modern México is a product of the rape of its first “Eve.”
17 Craske also notes the similarities between the situation of women in the beginning years of the Mexican Revolution and the decade of the 1990s. In both cases, the State (and the major political forces vying to gain power) promoted an agenda of equal rights using the women’s claims for political gain. If the political parties were seen as progressive and modern (supporting the women’s rights movement), they could garner the votes from all the women who felt disempowered by the current regimes. Although in principle the political establishment supported gendered citizenship and equality, in reality they were also promoting the traditional “stay at home,” submissive role of women embodied in the Virgen de Guadalupe image. Not surprisingly, the conflicting paradox of the virgin-whore stood in the way of women’s rights.
18 The “culebrón” is another name for the traditional Latin American soap operas, many of which are based on actual “novelas rosas.”
19 The novel-testimony Hasta no verte Jesús Mío, by the Mexican author Elena Poniatowska, makes that last point quite clear. Based on the true account of an ex-soldadera, Josefina Bojorquez, the novel narrates the life in abject poverty, the trials and tribulations, but most importantly the marginalization of one of the “forgotten,” an exceptional woman who fights for the Revolution believing in the broken promises made to these women fighters who shed blood and tears only to be cast aside at the end of the conflict.
20 See Craske.
21 The actual Spanish word is “quimera” (chimera), which I find more descriptive than “illusions” (Mastretta 348).
22 The actual Spanish word, “desaliento,” is a much better descriptor for this state of being, a sadness so profound it literally robs you of the ability to breathe.
23 Perhaps it is just a tall tale for tourists, but the process of “voicing fears” has deep psychoanalytical implications.
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