Mexico, “La Novela:”
Time Travel Guide through Mythical Mexico City
By Carmen Rioja
Featured image by Aurora de Luca
The recent publication of the award-winning Mexican writer Pedro Ángel Palou is not only a historical novel. It’s also a cartography for explorers to delve into mythical Mexico City and its history, from the time of the conquest of the great Tenochtitlán to the 1985 earthquake. Palou is the author of 40 books, including “Huge Loves” (Jorge Ibargüengoitia Award) and “With Death in His Fists” (Xavier Villaurrutia Award). His novels are populated by historical figures like Porfirio Díaz in “My Poor Homeland;” Pancho Villa in “Don’t Let Me Die Like This;” Lázaro Cárdenas in “Red Earth;” the novel “Morelos: To Die Is Nothing;” and “Cuauhtémoc: The Defense of the Fifth Sun.” These are all considered essential in the new corpus of the Mexican historical novel.
Palou studied literature and linguistics, has honorary doctorates from several universities in Latin America and a doctorate in social sciences from the Colegio de Michoacán, and is a professor at Tufts University in the United States, where he has lived for several years.
In his most recent, major work “Mexico: A Novel,” he speaks of the fall the great city of Tenochtitlán, and how, after being defeated and destroyed, it rose again countless times. We get to know the rude voice of Hernán Cortés the conqueror, and the united voices of Mexico that rise up after the earthquake that left half the city destroyed in 1985. We experience how the city is composed of many cities, neighborhoods, and cultures melded into one. It has seen heroes, families, and entire genealogies pass through the centuries, all of whom have rebuilt it. In Palou’s narrative, four main families become our guides. We’re taken chapter by chapter through historical places and scenes, where the ideals of the future democracy are discussed.
The author, Pedro Ángel Palou, is one of the brilliant members of the “Crack Generation,” along with Jorge Volpi and Ignacio Padilla. He gave Atención San Miguel an exclusive interview at the international festival “Hay Queretaro” this year:
Carmen Rioja: Master Pedro Ángel Palou, your most recent historical novel is perhaps the first to cover such an extensive period and also four genealogies of representative families. It must have been a very big challenge. How long did this unprecedented investigation take to research in archives and read the sources?
Pedro Ángel Palou: Yes, Carmen, it was four and a half years. It was very difficult, because it wasn’t just collecting information, but imagining scenes that were as close to reality on one side and fictional on the other. It didn’t have the strait jacket of other historical novels where, as Marguerite Yourcenar said regarding her “Memoirs of Hadrian,” the life of the person you are novelizing is already encrypted; he has already died. Here you have to invent genealogies, make very large maps where it says when who dies, when whose daughter is born, who was actually the cousin, etc. While I like sagas, doing a four-family saga was crazy.
(Palou discusses immigrations—such as the Syrian one—of the original Indian families who saw their parents defeated by the Spanish. He tells the story of mestizos, slaves, mulattoes, and others of the many castes in which the Spanish regents classified the urban
population—the stories that nobody has told. This brings us closer to the Cuautle, Santoveña, Landero, and Sefamí families in his book.)
C.R: What can we tell our readers from other parts of the world and North Americans who live in Mexico? What can they find in this book?
P.A.P: First of all, they are going to find a guide to Mexico City for locals and strangers. It’s a guide they can always carry to get to know places like Alameda or Bosque de Chapultepec or neighborhoods and markets like La Merced, where the most important meetings among the characters take place. In addition to this, foreigners are going to find themselves in Mexico, reflected in others who, like them, decided to come as great explorers of Mexico. There is a chapter dedicated to Alexander Von Humboldt, and his meticulous inventories of flora and fauna, and hydrographic and geological descriptions and maps, with amazing descriptions of the landscape.
“Mexico, La Novela” is a tour guide through squares and markets, alleys, palaces, and neighborhoods. Some of these survived from the time of Emperor Moctezuma, despite all the catastrophes, and are witnesses to most significant events. From the dispossession of temples and palaces after the conquest, through the struggle for independence, and the foundation of the first Empire, the revolution, and the construction of a model of a nation.
In its pages, we find Emiliano Zapata, Venustiano Carranza, and Francisco Villa.
C.R: As a poet, what has writing this great work meant to you?
P.A.P: It was not only about paying homage to the city but also to those who have told of the city over the centuries. You have a double responsibility, the responsibility of drawing a literary map in the literary tradition, sometimes without fear of palimpsest, without fear of saying “Here I am, playing at writing like Payno,” or trying to impersonate the traditional chroniclers, including Cervantes and Salazar and their dialogues. So I had an indigenous person tell the story.
We see between the lines how, despite the fact that it’s been destroyed and devastated over and over again by political and economic interests, Mexico City has been able to rise from the ruins thanks to the determination and inventiveness of its inhabitants. It’s the great infinite and eternal city, a story of refugees, migrants, dreamers, and transformers—at last a plural miscegenation through the centuries.
Palou’s novel approaches the history of Mexico with academic rigor. But it also integrates a poetic and literary vision that’s essential to understand a city. For example, in a chapter, we read fragments of the letters of Sigüenza and Góngora, the poems of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, or a fragment of the poem by Octavio Paz, “I speak of the City”: […like a galaxy,/ the city that dreams of us all…].
