Adam Spires
Founder of the Group of 100,1 a prominent environmental protection organization, writer Homero Aridjis is one of Latin America’s leading environmental activists, with numerous achievements to his credit in defence of Mexico’s natural heritage, most notably his successful campaign to safeguard the annual monarch butterfly migration in his home state of Michoacán. This activism very much informs and is reflected within his poetic, dramatic, and fictional work. Owing to Aridjis’ determined lobbying against logging companies and local officials, the monarch’s wintering grounds were finally declared a nature reserve. To struggle against multinational corporations and the collusion of local governments is standard for environmentalists, but in Mexico the challenges they face are intensified by the country’s subordination to economic pressures from the North, a relationship satirized in the time-honoured expression “Poor Mexico: so far from God, and so close to the United States.” Indeed, since its independence from Spain in 1821, Mexico has ceded territory and economic sovereignty to the United States and, increasingly, to other countries of the Global North.
The imbalance of power and influence within the North–South divide becomes all the more onerous for environmentalists like Aridjis in this era of global neoliberalism when free markets take precedence over the welfare of local habitats in developing countries. The signing of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) presents a case in point. Aridjis had lobbied to have the monarch butterfly adopted as the official symbol of NAFTA, which would have been a compelling reminder to respect sound environmental practices in all three countries traversed by the butterfly during the round-trip migrations of its life cycle. It was a noble idea befitting what was to be dubbed the “greenest trade agreement in history” (Roberts and Thanos 56) insofar as NAFTA would pioneer an environmentalist side agreement, and establish a governing body to manage environmental affairs: the Commission for Environmental Cooperation (CEC).2 Unfortunately, nothing came of Aridjis’ idea and, worse yet, the monarch population suffered precipitous declines in the years that followed, and disruptions to their migratory patterns remain a growing concern.
Illegal logging still occurs in the nature reserve but the more immediate cause of the butterfly’s dwindling numbers has been identified as agricultural practices in Canada and the United States, where genetically modified crops and herbicides are used in tandem to eradicate milkweed, the monarch’s primary source of food and nesting grounds. From the foregoing, the monarch reminds us of the risks associated with free trade agreements and the anonymity of environmental responsibility. For Aridjis, it is clear that his victory on the local front has proven insufficient. Like free trade, environmental issues do not stop at borders. Any additional victories that Aridjis stands to achieve in the name of Mexican conservation will require that his efforts grow in proportion to the portentous global economy. It is a monumental task befitting an activist who has devoted his entire career to championing just causes: from environmentalism to defending human rights and freedom of expression.
Importantly, this direct public engagement is mirrored in his literary works, where Aridjis equally resists and questions the imperatives and environmental repercussions of the Global North within Mexico. The author of over thirty titles, Aridjis has also conveyed his vision of environmental justice through a corpus of poetry, drama, and fiction that captures half a century of his growing apprehension of the modern age. In this respect, literature has proven a worthwhile medium for engagement with an adversary that is as ethereal as it is universal: namely, globalization. More specifically, in his two novels, The Legend of the Suns (1993) and Who Do You Think of When Making Love? (1995), Aridjis is situated within a specific Mexican literary claiming of dystopia, one that critiques Mexico’s attempts to modernize in order to meet the demands of global capital. Dystopia becomes the vehicle for writing about an immediate local context, one in which the cyclicism of the environment and of indigenous mythology are sacrificed for the linearity of capital progression. It is only in the apocalyptic conclusion of this narrative of erasure, amid the ruins, that the reimagining can begin.
Arguably the greatest challenge that Aridjis addresses in his writing is the drive to catch up with other industrialized nation-states, a mindset that has governed Mexican policy for over a century. In the late nineteenth century, Porfírio Díaz—who converted the country into the so-called “mother of foreigners, and stepmother of Mexicans”—was determined to modernize Mexico according to models of progress imported from Europe. Under his dictatorship, a simulacrum of modernity was fostered in the capital city, while social inequities were ignored in the countryside where the Mexican peasantry (the campesinos) and indigenous communities lived under a feudal system of often foreign-owned landed estates. The injustice was enough to spark a revolution.3 Though an agrarian reform under President Cárdenas (1934–40) would later see land redistributed via the ejido system,4 by the 1950s, the Green Revolution and the modernization of agriculture was beginning to threaten subsistence farming with an ever-encroaching commercial sector. The result was an unprecedented exodus from rural towns, heading either to the northern border and beyond, or straight to Mexico City.
By the time President Salinas ratified NAFTA, he had already enacted Article 27, ending the ejido system that had been enshrined in the constitution, effectively paving the way for a new era of privatizations. For NAFTA critics, the would-be utopia of Mexican modernity was equated with unsustainable urban growth, a border abandoned to the predation of the maquiladora industry,5 PRI totalitarianism6—notorious for electoral fraud, corruption, and violence—and both campesinos and indigenous communities living in squalor, fearful of land expropriation by foreign companies. NAFTA was supposed to protect Mexico from another debt crisis. It did not. More economic crises would follow. NAFTA supporters promised economic growth and an ensuing trickle-down effect to the lower classes, not the islands of high-tech wealth surrounded by seas of poverty that characterize the burgeoning maquiladora sector. The upsurge in remittances is ample testimony that globalization does not enrich Mexicans but, rather, displaces them. NAFTA was supposed to safeguard the environment but, as critics point out, spending on environmental protection dropped by nearly 50 percent following NAFTA and, not surprisingly, every major environmental problem in Mexico has since worsened (Roberts and Thanos 59). For the growing number of Mexicans already marginalized by the country’s integration into global capitalism, it was clear that NAFTA would only accelerate the country’s perilous race to the bottom.7
Accordingly, Subcomandante Marcos—Mexico’s postmodern defender of social justice—chose NAFTA’s inaugural day for his army of indigenous insurgents, the Zapatistas, to take up arms in protest. In anticipation of NAFTA’s fallout, they were asserting their human and territorial rights in the name of Zapata, the 1910 revolutionary. For the indigenous peoples of Chiapas, and the rural peasantry nation-wide, NAFTA was equated with nothing less than a return to the nineteenth-century Porfiriato.
Mexico’s unmanageable economic burden is symptomatic of a trend that sees other underdeveloped countries in Latin America hastening to modernize in order to participate in the global economy. They are the nation-states that are left unfinished, still a long way from achieving the prosperous, capitalist democracies that they have been promised by the myth of development. How a mere free trade agreement should close the gap between a developing nation like Mexico and its northern neighbours is incomprehensible. Even the phrase “developing nation” is a misnomer, as it has come to suggest an evolutionary certainty toward a final result of material progress when, in actuality, the pursuit of prosperity in developing nations remains as elusive as the conquistador’s search for El Dorado (de Rivero 72). In Mexico, the rich continue to get richer, while poverty has not abated. At best, Mexico has achieved “buffer state” status, a subordinate role ratified by NAFTA, and stabilized, when necessary, by financial bailouts (de Rivero 44).
Echoing José Martí’s historic warning against the “false erudition” (138) of European colonizers, Homero Aridjis has consistently argued that the very concepts of global capitalism and development do not match Mexico’s nature in the first place. For Aridjis, they are foreign ideals, imposed by the superpowers of the West, whereas Mexico is a country with a pre-Columbian—read pre-Western—cultural heritage. In effect, the indigenous past and Mexico’s relationship to nature in many ways remain the round hole for modernity’s square peg. It is only through the complicity of local elites who stand to gain, and unscrupulous governments—from the Porfiriato to Salinas—that Western ideologies have come to dominate Mexican affairs, much to the detriment of the lower classes and the environment. For impoverished campesinos and indigenous groups, in particular, environmentalism is not just about protecting nature; rather, it means having access to protected nature: clean water, fertile land, and forest resources. As these rudiments of rural life diminish under the advance of agribusiness and other so-called progressive forms of development, Mexico City and northern border towns swell with ever increasing numbers of displaced migrants, tipping the scales to record levels of poverty and environmental degradation. Indeed, the deficiencies stemming from Mexico’s economic ambitions are many, and they have been sufficiently distressing to warrant the taking up of a genre new to Mexican writers: the dystopian novel.
Aridjis is part of a larger trend on the part of Mexican writers to employ the dystopian novel for addressing the aftermath of global integration. There is an unambiguous cause-and-effect relationship between NAFTA and the emergence of the Mexican dystopia. In López-Lozano’s chronicle of this genre in Mexico, he draws a parallel between the angst provoked in Mexico by globalization and the dehumanizing effects of the industrial revolution that stirred the fears conveyed in the original European dystopias a century earlier (1). That NAFTA was signed at the time of the quincentenary—five hundred years after the first contact between Europeans and indios—is a bitter irony that stages a recurring dystopian motif: the erasure of the indigenous past by the technocratic future. In Mexico, the dystopian genre is thus calibrated a priori as a post-colonial eco-critique that views the Western paradigm of modernity as a thinly veiled strategy of neocolonial exploitation. Consequently, in the five novels that López-Lozano identifies as the canon of Mexican dystopias, there is a common thread that runs through each of them in their repositioning of the meaning of modernity measured against the conquest of both indigenous peoples and nature. These novels include: Christopher Unborn (1987) by Carlos Fuentes; The Rag Doll Plagues (1992) by Alejandro Morales; The Legend of the Suns (1993) and Who Do You Think of When Making Love? (1995) by Homero Aridjis; and Heavens on Earth (1997) by Carmen Boullosa.8 As López-Lozano affirms, “written under the shadow of NAFTA, these dystopian novels engage the theme of Mexico’s pattern of development, revisiting images of science fiction to depict the potentially disastrous impact of globalization on the environment and on the indigenous peoples of the Americas” (4). It bears mentioning here that eco-criticism is a standard motif of the dystopian genre, by no means particular to Mexican literature. Having emerged in response to the rise of the machine and humankind’s resultant alienation in urban slums, for over a century dystopias have brought to light our detachment from nature and, by extension, from our natural instincts, hence the collective nature-deficit disorder that tends to characterize dystopian societies. Moreover, dystopias commonly extrapolate from distressing trends in urban growth to envision a global civilization that has exceeded the planet’s carrying capacity. At length, that human culture must be recalibrated to ensure a sustainable symbiosis with its natural habitat is a tenet held by both environmentalists and skeptics of the modern age. These are two schools of thought that come to a confluence in the better part of dystopian fiction.
In such classic dystopias as Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We (1924), Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), and George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), for example, the representation of how the state controls the relationship between humans and nature is key. What varies in this theme is the novelist’s foresight into how or why the future might lead to such unnatural worlds. For this reason, it is particularly noteworthy that the portrayal of nature in the canon of Mexican dystopias is consistent through all five novels. Fuentes, Morales, Aridjis, and Boullosa all fashion their nightmarish societies around the same perceived threat to Mexico’s well-being, specifically, pollution. What is more, the cause to which environmental crisis is attributed is also consistent throughout the five novels: Mexico’s injudicious pursuit of modernity. There are thus critical differences that surface between the Mexican dystopia and the European classics of the genre. In contrast to the literary technique of “defamiliarization” (Booker 19) that characterizes the latter—exemplified by ambiguous settings in the remote future with only vague nuances to orient readers to familiar points of reference—what sets the Mexican dystopia apart is the immediacy of a local crisis. Written in NAFTA’s wake, these novels extrapolate specifically from Mexico’s economic turmoil in order to project an already recognizable environmental aftermath. Another distinction pertains to how the dystopia of Mexico’s future is weighed against the indigenous past, when a cosmology centred on nature worship was suppressed by a supposedly more advanced world view. As a barometer of Mexico’s future, it is indeed a compelling prophecy that four different novelists should converge on the pivotal signing of a free trade agreement in order to warn of the impending environmental consequences, and that they should evoke the indigenous past as an implicit countercultural discourse.
The story of Christopher Unborn, by Carlos Fuentes, opens on the polluted beaches of Acapulco, where the fetal narrator is conceived. During the nine chapters of his gestation, he bears witness to the ravages of the Mexican landscape as a result of his country’s blind pursuit of progress, best exemplified in state-sponsored slogans: “CITIZENS OF MEXICO: INDUSTRIALIZE. YOU WON’T LIVE LONGER BUT YOU WILL LIVE BETTER” (23). As Christopher approaches full term, he fears that the environment will redirect his genetic course, that he will mutate before birth since he has been exposed to so much pollution: “that’s all there is here: rubbish, decomposition, mountains of garbage, an implacable circle of garbage, a chain of garbage, linked by a network of plastic and rags…. If I’m not the son of my genes, then must I be the (bastard) son of the environment” (462). Such is the danger awaiting the next generation born in “Makesicko City” (76).
In a similar fashion, Alejandro Morales depicts a future when pollution and poverty are so prevalent in Mexico City that pepenadores (garbage pickers) undergo a genetic mutation, just as Fuentes’ narrator had feared. It is a mere evolutionary adaptation to a changing environment. Like Fuentes, Morales calls attention to nature’s influence on our epigenetics, on how our genes can either be activated or go dormant, depending largely on the health of our natural surroundings. It is a process that, over time, can lead to enduring variations. As Morales foresees it, Mexico’s poorest are afforded an evolutionary advantage from this genetic shift, only to find themselves exploited once again by Euro-Americans who require life-saving blood transfusions from “MCMs” (Mexico City Mexicans) to survive the ecological plagues of the future. Analogous to modernity’s destruction of nature, injustices committed in the colonial past are evoked in this novel to frame the Mexican labourer’s history of subservience. It is the mid-twenty-first century, and though NAFTA has developed into one political body (The Triple Alliance), the imbalance in human rights between North and South has not changed. Mexico’s poor are still consumed north of the border like an imported commodity.
Similar to Morales’ novel, Carmen Boullosa’s dystopia is structured within three time frames: the colonial past, the late twentieth century, and the post-apocalypse. Hundreds of years into the future, the Earth is uninhabitable as the result of a disastrous ecocide. The few survivors inhabit “L’Atlàntide,” a community made up of spheres floating in the sky. As in the novels by Fuentes and Morales, Boullosa’s characters, the dystopian heroines, include anthropologists and archaeologists who bring out the indigenous past for the purpose of diagnosis and commentary on the dystopian future. L’Atlàntide is depicted as humanity’s rise to perfection through technological advance. However, the pursuit of progress heedless of past mistakes that should have taught us our natural place in the world leads to humanity’s ultimate degeneration: infanticide, cannibalism, and, in the end, extinction.
Ultimately, this binary model that portrays nature and indigenous heritage as the victims of enduring colonial ambition is best represented by Homero Aridjis, as one might expect given his illustrious profile as Mexico’s most renowned environmentalist and an outspoken human rights advocate. His task as a writer, as he words it, “is to tell the stories of this planet and to express an ecological cosmology that does not separate nature from humanity” (Russell 66).9 It is evident in his two dystopian novels that this “ecological cosmology” is aligned with the indio’s reverence of nature, as recorded in Aztec mythology. Herein lies his riposte to the errant utopian ideals of the West that continue to wreak havoc on his country. Aridjis reminds us that “Mexico” is derived from “Mexica”—meaning “Aztec”—and that long before Tenochtitlán came to be known as “Mexico City,” the Aztecs prophesied that when the fifth sun came to the end of its cycle, the city would crumble. For Aridjis, the extremes of Mexico’s environmental crises are a sign that the prophecy of the fifth sun is coming to fruition.
Aridjis’ novels The Legend of the Suns and its sequel Who Do You Think of When Making Love? recount simultaneous stories that take place in the year 2027, a generation after NAFTA. The intrigue of the first involves a quest to recover a missing page from a sacred codex of Aztec lore. If the protagonist succeeds, the goddess of the sixth sun will restore balance between humans and nature. In the sequel, the narrator, “Yo Sánchez,” treks across an apocalyptic urban landscape with her friends, relating her life story. Distressed by the violence and pollution that surround them, they press on against the backdrop of a foreboding climate of uncertainty. In effect, it is this background setting of Mexico City’s chaos that presages the main lines of reasoning of both novels while, as López-Lozano argues, their respective plots serve more “as the pretext for Aridjis’s examination of Mexico’s projected post-NAFTA future, a future in which political corruption and the destruction of nature have called into question the goals of global industrialization” (179). Aridjis puts forward no curative measures for this calamity. On the contrary, for the Mexico City of the near future it is too late. However, this is not to say that all is lost. Instead, nature is reborn once Western paradigms of progress and development run their course, ushering civilization to its apocalyptic end.
One of the more compelling points made in these novels pertains to how nature’s collapse leads to the erosion of society. Consistent through both stories, social decay is measured in terms of the widespread violence against Mexico City’s most vulnerable, primarily the street children who are sold to the sex trade or to the black market for the extraction and sale of vital organs. Such depravity accentuates both the looming insecurity of dystopia and the hubris of political tyranny. Ruthless power is wielded by President Huitzilopochtli of the timeless PRI—satirized as the PRC, “Partido Revolucionario de la Corrupción”10—and by police chief General Tezcatlipoca. As their names suggest, they are, in essence, wicked Aztec gods who battle one another for supremacy, indifferent to the resultant upheavals. Hyperbole gives this dystopia a satirical tone, evoking a seemingly fatalistic attitude toward the mainstays of political corruption, violence, and overpopulation. To attest to a culture on the wane, bereft of any humane values, marginalized children are showcased on dystopia’s front lines, depicted in an array of atrocities within public view and juxtaposed with familiar landmarks. The faceless, nameless multitude ambles on, leaving its footprints in the freshly fallen ash, apathetic to injustice and to their city on the brink of collapse, “not because of natural disasters, but rather, the inept and corrupt hand of man” (Aridjis, La leyenda 143).11 In the reckless haste to industrialize, Mexico has ironically created living conditions that regress to colonial times, illustrating that, in developing countries, economic globalization proves counterproductive. Infrastructure is derelict and sewage runs through streets lit by torches during perpetual blackouts. Even language bears the mark of digression, Americanized to a Spanglish that accommodates the market economy.
Posited throughout this inauspicious portrayal of the future, frequent references to an environmental crisis corroborate the argument that when nature perishes, culture follows. Humankind’s vital bond to nature is staged at the opening of The Legend when the protagonist, Juan de Góngora, perceives that the “gradual loss of earth, air, and water around him was the loss of his own self” (17).12 Pollution becomes the next generation’s natural habitat. The sky has taken on a life of its own, like a toxic grey amoeba, and the only rain that falls is ash and metallic particles, requiring a new vocabulary to describe the smog that has permanently replaced weather patterns: “Here people used to talk about the February dust storms, the downpours in May, October’s moon and the chills of December. Now they were talking about floating particles, thermal inversions, and ozone concentrations” (42).13 Air pollution has reached a critical extreme but the water crisis is worse yet. In both novels, the city is portrayed as a suffering body dying of thirst, and, to underscore modernity’s failure to manage this vital resource, the misery of millions without water is contrasted to the earthly paradise of ancient Tenochtitlán, a veritable Atlantis in the eyes of the astonished conquistadors, a city floating on water. The reader witnesses this vision vicariously through Juan de Góngora, who, unlike the automaton masses, remembers that his environment “had not always been that unbreathable immensity that made your eyes water and scratched your throat but rather, a luminous valley covered with glimmering lakes and ever-lasting greenery” (15).14 Ultimately, that a city once permeated by fresh water should suffer such devastating drought where the only flow is raw sewage incites a “vile reminiscence of what was once the Venice of the Americas” (19).15
Environmental catastrophe is thus the central conflict against which Aridjis deploys the common dystopian motif of an ancient manuscript that, though unlikely to resolve the conflict, promises to shed light on its origins. Guided by the descendant of Coatlicue (Aztec goddess), if Juan de Góngora can recover the missing page of the codex and decipher its archaic signs, then the past may reveal itself in order to illuminate the future. By weighing this mythological intrigue—coupled with sporadic dialogues in Náhuatl16—against the modern city, Aridjis generates a poignant contrast that polarizes our perception of a pre-colonial utopia brutally destroyed by a post-colonial dystopia. It is both a condemnation of Mexico’s ambition to imitate Western models of progress and a mockery of the political elite’s illusion that Mexico controls its own future. To challenge these assumptions, Aridjis envisions the natural world, presided over by primeval gods, as the real force at work behind Mexico’s fate. By dispensing with the Aztecs’ religious cosmology and their reverence of nature in order to abide instead by imperialist hegemony, what Mexico has achieved is nothing more than the acceleration of its own annihilation. Accordingly, Aridjis brings his moralizing tale to an unambiguous denouement. Destroyed by an earthquake, Mexico City lies in ruins while, sacred and symbolic, the city’s sister volcanoes, Popocatépetl and Iztac Cíhuatl, reappear on the horizon as the shroud of contaminated skies begins to lift.
Ever the environmentalist, early in the sequel—Who Do You Think of When Making Love?—Aridjis stages a cameo appearance for the now iconic monarch butterfly: “I hadn’t seen them since my childhood. Disoriented, they flew among the graves and dead trees, perhaps in search of water. One of them, like the survivor of a biological extinction, a ghost from migrations past, out of place and time, lit in María’s hair” (25).17 There is, however, no water to be found. As mentioned earlier, the sequel runs concurrently with the first story, foregrounding the same environmental woes. The “One day without a car” initiative is replaced in 2027 with a “One day without breathing” (200)18 program: a sardonic about-face from the earlier efforts to reduce motor vehicle emissions. As in the first novel, indigenous children linger in the background of the toxic metropolis as easy targets for sexual exploitation or extermination by police brigades responsible for ridding the city of undesirables. There are frequent references to rape and the child sex trade as evidence that the devaluation of the peso has ushered in an equal measure of “human devaluation” (228).19 Here, again, Aridjis overlaps nature’s collapse with society’s ensuing debauchery and collective state of alienation. This correlation is brought to the fore by the protagonist’s own estrangement from the natural world of the past: “In many parts of the nation they were declaring environmental emergencies that were becoming permanent…. I felt defenseless against the onerous fantasy of our age, defenseless against that heartless sprawl that was replacing the world of my ancestors, and forming a strange reality where familiar objects slowly became the cold inventions of some anonymous technology” (179).20 It is indeed this sense of anonymity that renders globalization unassailable to any opposition. Thus, unlike the rebellious protagonist from The Legend, “Yo Sánchez” remains submissive, resigned to a dystopian fate: “I’m an urban animal, uprooted from nature, that breathes polluted air and drinks contaminated water, and that’s how I’ll die” (165).21
If, in the first novel, it is the contrasting Aztec imagery of Tenochtitlán that stands dystopia in relief, here, in the sequel, the more prominent technique is via simulacrum: dystopia’s feeble attempt to mask an impending doom. For instance, the ubiquitous “Circe”—a system of interactive telescreens—has effectively steered attention away from the local crises.22 Broadcasting “the happiest times of our History”23 (188), the screen “had converted human beings into thinking pigs [who] pass the hours and the years asleep with their eyes open, devouring the images and sounds” (176).24 Life experience is thus replaced by electronic sensation. Nature, too, is simulated throughout the city, concealing the ecocide with plastic trees, and with rubber dolphins swimming in artificial lakes. They are dystopia’s synthetic surrogate for Mother Nature. And to emulate prosperity, historic buildings are demolished so that props inspired by more modern cities can be erected in their stead. Once again, language, the very essence of cultural identity, conforms to economic pressures, as citizens are prompted to learn to “speak correctly [at the] Spanglish School” (235).25 Clearly, the impetus behind these new values stems from Mexico’s commitment to imitate progress, and to project the facade of a productive integration into the global economy. As expected, to accentuate the country’s moral failings, only the novel’s protagonists perceive the perverse contradictions of Mexico’s admission into the new world order, leading them to question the validity of erasing the sacred past in the interest of pursuing economic growth: “we’ve replaced the high priests with accountants, the shamans with economists, the wizards with lawyers” (218).26 Finally, the seismic tremors that ripple through the sequel, like an aftershock from the previous novel, culminate in the same catastrophic earthquake. It is the end of the fifth sun, and of Mexico City. As in the first novel, the destruction of dystopia heralds the era of the sixth sun, and the rebirth of nature, bringing this dystopian duet to a dramatic and eco-critical close. Confused by the fiery blaze of destruction, birds long absent from the dystopian metropolis return to the setting and begin to sing, mistaking the crimson glow of the apocalypse for the breaking of a new dawn.
Thus, Aridjis’ novels evidence a predominant theme of the Mexican dystopia: the disownment of the parents of today’s Mexico, who have sold out to foreign investment, and the replacement of them with indigenous ancestry conjured from the distant past. Dystopian fiction, by its nature, is a vehicle of social criticism designed to disturb, but not necessarily to set forth any solutions. The sacred indigenous past is evoked not to augur hope for what Mexico could be but, rather, to parody what it has become. Though the countercultural discourse of indigenous ethics may hold a tempting moral appeal inasmuch as it implies a superior, ecology-based set of guiding principles, at no point do these dystopian novels digress into the realms of the New Age or Neopagan movements that advocate a tabula rasa return to nature and to indigenous ways. In his 1971 treatise Tiempo mexicano, Carlos Fuentes concluded plainly on this point, “imposible Quetzalcóatl, indeseable Pepsicóatl” (39), meaning that a return to indigenous culture under the god Quetzalcóatl is simply impossible. Nevertheless, a culture grounded in consumer values that worships the almighty dollar, presided over by Pepsicóatl, is equally undesirable. If the following, more recent Walmart scandal at Teotihuacán is any indication, then Mexico can only expect a protraction of Pepsicóatl’s imperious reign.
This scandal is an example of the immediate context that is presaged in Aridjis’ texts. The year 2027, the setting of his dystopian novels, is not a random projection. According to the Aztec calendar, 2027 marks the next pilgrimage to Teotihuacán—an archaeological site located fifty kilometres north of Mexico City—for the ritualistic relighting of fires to pay tribute to the sun. In 2004, however, Teotihuacán came under the spotlight as the meeting place, not for religious ceremonies, but for commercial pursuits. In spite of zoning laws, widespread news coverage, and public outcry, Walmart de México succeeded in opening a store within the protected archaeological zone of what the Aztecs called “the city of the gods,” not far from the stately Pyramids of the Sun and Moon. Such a brazen violation of indigenous patrimony raised the ire of protesters on both sides of the border, frustrated with the deference shown by local officials to the commercial giant. Residents also bemoaned the encroachment of U.S. consumer values, “united by a fear that Wal-Mart was inexorably drawing Mexico’s people away from the intimacy of neighborhood life, toward a bland, impersonal ‘gringo lifestyle’ of frozen pizzas, video games and credit card debt” (Barstow and von Bertrab 18). Regrettably, even in ancient Teotihuacán, poor Mexico remains so far from the gods, and so close to the United Sates. The message here is unnervingly clear: if Walmart can build at Teotihuacán, it can build anywhere.
In his op-ed piece, “The Sun, the Moon and Walmart,” Aridjis, who is accustomed to being offered bribes and/or death threats whenever his environmental campaigns thwart the advance of big business, argues that corruption from inside the system is as much to blame as external factors. Free trade agreements may attract multinational companies to Mexico, but it is internal corruption that allows them to break the rules once they get there. Such is the case with the multiple Walmart scandals in Mexico, involving an estimated total value of $24 million in bribes for fraudulent building permits (Aridjis, “The Sun, the Moon and Walmart” 1). It is a challenge to imagine how even the most staunch adherents to global neoliberalism might spin the scenario at Teotihuacán into anything resembling progress. Nevertheless, there is an inherent contradiction in the notion of progress itself that Aridjis calls to our attention. It stems from a view of history as teleological, as a steady advance toward an improved final cause. Conversely, Aridjis’ novels, informed by Aztec history, remind us that, like the laws of nature, mythological time is cyclical, not linear, and that the indigenous legacy of mythology is inextricable from Mexico’s future. For this reason, the dystopian city that encroaches on nature and marginalizes indigenous peoples supposedly to liberate Mexicans through economic development must be sacrificed so that a new generation, imbued with an environmental conscience, can take its place.
1 The Group of 100 was founded by Aridjis in 1985. It consists of prominent artists and intellectuals devoted to environmental protection in Mexico and throughout Latin America. Under Aridjis’ leadership, they have succeeded in legislating protection for sea turtles, grey whales, and wildlife sanctuaries. Also owing to their efforts, stricter regulations were implemented to reduce motor vehicle emissions in Mexico City.
2 The CEC (Commission for Environmental Cooperation) is headquartered in Montreal, and operates in Canada, Mexico, and the United States.
3 The Mexican Revolution was a decade-long civil war that began in 1910. Its most notable figures include the dictator Porfírio Díaz—whose thirty-five years of rule are referred to as the “Porfiriato”—and the two revolutionaries: Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata.
4 The 1917 Constitution abolished the colonial encomienda, a feudal structure of land holdings. Under the ejido system, land was expropriated from haciendas (landed estates) by the Mexican government, and allocated to peasant farmers for communal use.
5 The “maquiladora belt” refers to the assembly plants or in-bound factories situated on the Mexican side of the United States border. Maquiladoras were developed originally in the 1960s from a Border Industrialization Program but can now be found throughout Mexico.
6 The Revolution gave rise to the Mexican Constitution of 1917, and the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (Institutional Revolutionary Party) known more commonly as the “PRI,” that held power until the general election of 2000.
7 The phrase “race to the bottom” refers to the current socio-economic trend whereby governments of developing countries reduce labour and environmental standards in the interest of attracting the business of multinational companies.
8 Only the novels by Fuentes and Morales are available in English. The titles of the novels by Aridjis and Boullosa (cited in this study) are translations. Their Spanish titles are La leyenda de los soles (1993) and ¿En quién piensas cuando haces el amor? (1995) by Aridjis; and Cielos de la Tierra by Boullosa.
9 “La tarea de los poetas y hombres santos es contar las historias de este planeta y expresar una cosmología ecológica que no separe a la naturaleza de la humanidad.”
10 “Partido Revolucionario de la Corrupción” translates as the “Revolutionary Party of Corruption.”
11 “ruinas contemporáneas no producidas por los desastres naturales sino por la mano inepta y corrupta del hombre.”
12 “la pérdida gradual de suelo, de aire y de agua a su alrededor era la pérdida de su propio yo.”
13 “Antes aquí las gentes platicaban de las tolvaneras de febrero, de los aguaceros de mayo, de la luna de octubre y de los fríos de diciembre, ahora hablan de las partículas suspendidas, de las inversiones térmicas y de las concentraciones de ozono.”
14 “ésta no siempre había sido esa inmensidad irrespirable que hacía llorar los ojos y raspaba la garganta, sino un valle luminoso cubierto de lagos resplandecientes y verdores inmarcesibles.”
15 “reminiscencias viles de lo que un día fue la Venecia americana.”
16 The language of the Aztecs, Náhuatl, along with its variations, is spoken today by over a million Nahua people, who live primarily in central Mexico.
17 “No las veía desde mi infancia. Desorientadas anduvieron entre las tumbas y los árboles muertos, quizás en busca de agua. Una de ellas, como sobreviviente de la extinción biológica y como fantasma de migraciones pasadas, fuera de lugar y de tiempo, se posó en el pelo de María.”
18 “Hoy no circula” and “Hoy no Respire.”
19 “las devaluaciones humanas”
20 “En muchas partes de la nación se declaraban emergencias ambientales que se convertían en permanentes…. Yo me sentía inerme ante la fantasía abrumadora de mi época, inerme ante ese orbe desalmado que suplantaba el mundo de mis ancestros y conformaba una realidad ajena en donde los objetos familiares se convertían poco a poco en las invenciones frías de una tecnología anónima.”
21 “Soy un animal urbano, desarraigado de la naturaleza, que respira aire contaminado y bebe agua poluta, y así moriré.”
22 The son of a Greek father and Mexican mother, Aridjis’ interest in ancient worlds also extends to Greek mythology, hence the reference to “Circe,” the enchantress who could transform her enemies into animals.
23 “Los tiempos más alegres de la Historia.”
24 “la Circe de la Comunicación había convertido a los seres humanos en puercos mentales. El prójimo puto y caníbal pasaba las horas y los años dormido con los ojos abiertos devorando las imágenes y los sonidos.”
25 “Speak con Propiedad: Escuela de Spanglish.”
26 “Hemos reemplazado a los sacerdotes por los contadores, a los chamanes por los economistas, a los magos por los licenciados.”
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