"ANTÍGONA GONZÁLEZ is the story of the search for a body, a specific body, one of the thousands of bodies lost in the war against drug trafficking that began more than a decade ago in Mexico. A woman, Antígona González, attempts to narrate the disappearance of Tadeo, her elder brother. She searches for her brother among the dead. San Fernando, Tamaulipas, appears to be the end of her search."--Provided by publisher.
“Breathless, marvelous . . . Latin American fiction at its pulpy, phantasmagorical finest . . . A literary masterpiece masquerading as a police procedural.” —Junot Diaz When a young journalist named Bernardo Blanco is killed in the fictional Mexican port city of Paracuán, investigation into his murder reveals missing links in a disturbing multiple homicide case from twenty years earlier. As police officer Ramón “el Macetón” Cabrera discovers, Blanco had been writing a book about a 1970s case dealing with the murder of several young schoolgirls in Paracuán by a man known as El Chaneque. Cabrera realizes that whoever killed Blanco wanted to keep the truth about El Chaneque from being revealed, and he becomes determined to discover that truth. The Black Minutes chronicles both Cabrera’s investigation into Blanco’s murder and goes back in time to follow detective Vicente Rangel’s investigation of the original El Chaneque case. Both narratives expose worlds of corruption, from cops who are content to close the door on a case without true justice to powerful politicians who can pay their way out of their families’ crimes. Full of dark twists and turns, and populated by a cast of captivating—and mostly corrupt—characters, The Black Minutes is an electrifying novel from a brilliant new voice. “Mr. Solares is a graceful, even poetic, writer, especially in his hard-boiled dialogue and his descriptions of the wildly varied landscapes and ethnic types of northern Mexico.” —Larry Rohter, The New York Times
Tijuana Dreaming is an unprecedented introduction to the arts, culture, politics, and economics of contemporary Tijuana, featuring selections by prominent scholars, journalists, bloggers, novelists, poets, curators, and photographers from Tijuana and greater Mexico.
An analysis of contemporary violence as the new commodity of today's hyper-consumerist stage of capitalism. “Death has become the most profitable business in existence.” —from Gore Capitalism Written by the Tijuana activist intellectual Sayak Valencia, Gore Capitalism is a crucial essay that posits a decolonial, feminist philosophical approach to the outbreak of violence in Mexico and, more broadly, across the global regions of the Third World. Valencia argues that violence itself has become a product within hyper-consumerist neoliberal capitalism, and that tortured and mutilated bodies have become commodities to be traded and utilized for profit in an age of impunity and governmental austerity. In a lucid and transgressive voice, Valencia unravels the workings of the politics of death in the context of contemporary networks of hyper-consumption, the ups and downs of capital markets, drug trafficking, narcopower, and the impunity of the neoliberal state. She looks at the global rise of authoritarian governments, the erosion of civil society, the increasing violence against women, the deterioration of human rights, and the transformation of certain cities and regions into depopulated, ghostly settings for war. She offers a trenchant critique of masculinity and gender constructions in Mexico, linking their misogynist force to the booming trade in violence. This book is essential reading for anyone seeking to analyze the new landscapes of war. It provides novel categories that allow us to deconstruct what is happening, while proposing vital epistemological tools developed in the convulsive Third World border space of Tijuana.
Luis Felipe Fabre's WRITING WITH CACA essays a lyric investigation of the Mexican modernist writer Salvador Novo. The book centers around an investigation and reclaiming of Los Anales, the original, derogatory nickname given to Novo and his compadres in the modernist group Los Contemporáneos. Through Novo, Fabre conjures a poetics of the anus: It is not in vain that the sphinx and the sphincter share a single etymological origin, he writes. Similar to Robert Duncan's HD Book, Susan Howe's My Emily Dickinson, and Pierre Michon's Rimbaud the Son, Fabre's WRITING WITH CACA is as much biography as auto-biography, and brings to the US an important work by an important contemporary Mexican writer. "A page-turner biography of the poet and writer Salvador Novo whose queer shoulder pushed every wall open. In here is Novo's deviant knowledge of what the shit and anus reveal of life, yet "resists is sublimation." This book is not for the timid, or maybe it is precisely for them!"--CAConrad "Luis Felipe Fabre, one of the most exciting and virtuosic Mexican poets of his generation, knows a lot of good shit. He knows a lot about Salvador Novo, the scatalogical Mexican poet of the early 20th century who, according to Octavio Paz, wrote 'not with blood but with caca.' This terrific book (translated with acrobatic brilliance by John Pluecker), is a work of literary history, literary criticism, poetry, and excretory theory that travels from the Aztecs to Sor Juana to the Mexican Revolution and to contemporary times. Fabre makes a compelling argument for the importance of Novo's writing with caca, and for the importance of celebrating writers who are driven by the 'urge to take a crap on all universal literature.'"--Daniel Borzutzky Poetry. Literary Nonfiction.
Poetry. Latino/Latina Studies. Translated from the Spanish by Jen Hofer. Bilingual Edition. INTERVENIR/INTERVENE is a searing, tender, unflinching collaboration between two Mexican poets Dolores Dorantes, who lived in Ciudad Juarez for 25 years and now has political asylum in Los Angeles, and Rodrigo Flores Sanchez, who lives in Mexico City. INTERVENIR/INTERVENE asks questions no one should have to ask: in a climate of state- sponsored violence, what kinds of speech, writing, relation are possible? We are being intervened. How do we collaborate? How do we resist? INTERVENIR/INTERVENE es una colaboracion mordaz, tierna e impavida entre dos poetas mexicanos Dolores Dorantes, que vivio 25 anos en Ciudad Juarez y ahora tiene asilo politico en Los angeles, y Rodrigo Flores Sanchez, que vive en la Ciudad de Mexico. INTERVENIR/INTERVENE hace preguntas que nadie deberia verse obligado a preguntar: en un clima de violencia promovida por el Estado, que tipos de expresion, de escritura, de relacion, son posibles? Estamos siendo intervenidos. Como colaboramos? Como resistimos?"
El autor salvadoreño Mario Bencastro examina temas de guerra, separación y nostalgia en esta colección bilingue de cuentos, poemas y una novela breve. Muchos de sus personajes son forzados a dejar su patria a causa de la violencia y la pobreza. Pero al encontrarse en la tierra prometida, lejos de su familia y amigos en un país cuy lengua y cultura no comprenden, se sienten abrumados por sentimientos de pérdida. En 'El Niño Dragón,' un grupo de huérfanos de la guerra civil salvadoreña se unen para sobrevivir, aún cuando son abusados por explotadores. En 'El Plan,' un exitoso millonario suizo retorna a su nativo El Salvador -- el cual dejó como un huérfano indefenso -- y ejecuta su despiadado plan para vengarse de los responsables del brutal asesinato de su familia. Y en 'De Australia Con Amor,' una emigrante salvadoreña planea casarse con un paisano que conoció en la Internet, hasta que cae en la cuenta de que lo ha visto antes." --From publisher's description.
Antigonas: Writing from Latin America is the first book in the English language to approach classical reception through the study of one classical fragment as it circulates throughout Latin America. This interdisciplinary research engages comparative literature, Latin American studies,classical reception, history, feminist theory, political philosophy, and theatre history. Moira Fradinger tracks the ways in which, since the early nineteenth century, fragments of Antigone's myth and tragedy have been persistently cannibalized and ruminated throughout South and Central America andthe Caribbean, quilted to local dramatic forms, revealing an archive of political thought about Latin America's heterogeneous neo-colonial histories. Antigona is consistently characterized as a national mother and, as the twentieth century advances, multiplied on stage, forming female collectives,foregrounding the urgency of systemic change or staging gender politics. Through meticulous examination of classical culture in necolonial contexts, Fradinger explores ways of reading Creole texts from the geopolitical South that disrupt the colonial reading protocols that deracinate texts or lockthem into locality. By historicizing Antigona plays and interpreting them with a purpose to address specific colonial legacies, the book reveals how Antigona has ceased being Greek and instead tells stories of twentieth- and twenty-first-century Latin America. Antigonas rethinks the paradigmsthrough which we understand the presence of ancient cultural materials in former colonial territories, while illuminating an understudied continent in Anglophone reception studies.
ñSuddenly I saw him appear in the train yard on the other side of the river, between the boxcars, Martin and a Migra, it looked like they were arguing, they lifted up their arms like they were gonna start wailing on each other, the Migra guy grabbed Martin by his shoulder and shook him, me and all the people on this side were watching close to see what was gonna happenî In the title story of this short story collection set along the Texas-Mexico border, young Monica waits for her boyfriend Martin under the bridge next to the Rio Grande running between El Paso and Ciudad Juarez. Martin is a pasamojados, someone who smuggles people across the river. When he asks her if she wants to leave with him, sheÍs afraid. Afraid to suffer the way her parents did when they went north, suffocating in heat and fear, unable to find a job. But in spite of her fears, she finds herself at the river bank, being pushed into the tire tube that serves as a raft, under the bridge. Mexican writer Rosario Sanmiguel crafts intriguing narratives about solitary women in search of their place, caught between the past and the present. Set in the border region, this collection follows these women?some from privileged backgrounds and others from more desperate circumstances?through seedy bars, hotel rooms, and city streets. A woman who has escaped the night life, dancing on platforms in front of thousands of eyes; Francis, who finally finds the strength to leave her married lover; young Fatima, whose mother abandons her, leaving her to take her place as a maid in a wealthy El Paso familyÍs mansion; Nicole, who has risen from dismal poverty to become an accomplished immigration attorney. Originally published in Mexico as Callejon Sucre y otros relatos (Ediciones del Azar, 1994), this edition contains a profound English translation by John Pluecker. The seven stories included in this collection interweave the opposing themes of solitude and connectedness, longing and privilege, fear and audacity, all of which are juxtaposed on the boundary of self-awareness.
