Dear friends,

Is your brain rotting? Mine certainly is. I can feel myself getting dumber with each passing year—and not because I’m prematurely undergoing the natural (and thus inevitable) decline that is the common fate of all sad-sack eukaryotes, but because I’ve yet to find a way to resist the historical (and thus contingent) drive to stupidity that is the ruling sign of our self-lobotomizing age.

I realize that this sort of curmudgeonry is the traditional province of reactionaries. Unlike leftist critiques, which are predicated on a utopian vision of the future, complaints about the decadence of the present are grounded on nostalgic idealizations of the past. Each time we declare that the world used to be better, we express a desire to restore that betrays us as conservatives. We’d be wiser to recognize that history has been nothing but an unending catastrophe; that rather than restored the past ought to be redeemed.

Then again, there’s no denying that even reactionaries who bemoan our era’s decadence are dumber than they used to be. Our adversaries used to be people like Carl Schmitt—now we have to argue with the likes of Curtis Yarvin. Instead of Leni Riefenstahl, we have Benny Johnson; instead of Martin Heidegger, we have Jordan Peterson. The most influential contemporary interpreter of Nietzsche calls himself “Bronze Age Pervert.” Our capitalists are so dumb they think that the consequentialist banalities of “effective altruism” are the apex of ethical thinking and that Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality is the culmination of western philosophy.

The worst part is that the intellectual decline of our enemies has not made them any less powerful and in fact may have made them more effective. Trump is far more idiotic than, I don’t know, Nixon—and yet he has managed to do far more harm than Tricky Dick. The reason seems obvious: the fascists are not the only ones getting dumber. Almost everyone is becoming increasingly stupid. How else to explain that so many regular people seem to be convinced that Elon Musk is some kind of genius?

Yet to say that dumb reactionaries are winning because people in general are getting dumber is to beg the question. Why are we becoming stupid? The answer probably has a great deal to do with technology. The use of smartphones, chatbots, and social media clearly results in an atrophy of the brain. It’s no wonder we are so invested in so-called artificial intelligence: we have lost so much of our cognitive capacity that our only hope is to outsource all thinking to glorified autocorrect software.

What’s interesting is that the technologies ruining our brains are all intimately related to language. Whether using them involves partaking in a particularly thoughtless kind of reading and writing (as is the case with Twitter and ChatGPT) or regressing to a pre-literate system of representation through images (as is the case with Instagram and Sora), the ascendancy of brain-rotting machines cannot be separated from the decline in other linguistic practices. It’s not just that we spend most of our waking hours consuming the vast troves of idiotic text and fatuous images fed to us by algorithms designed to transform our attention into a commodity, but also that we spend fewer and fewer minutes engaging with the sort of texts that could help us be less stupid.

That, at least, is what went through my head as I wrote the little piece that I’d like to share with you today. The good people at The Baffler asked me to write a brief introduction for one of the features of their most recent issue: a dossier of short essays on the decline of literature and literacy by writers from seven different countries. Since the piece is an invitation to read the rest of the magazine—and hopefully to subscribe to it as well!—I’ve decided to post the whole thing here:

BOTH IN TERMS OF ABSOLUTE NUMBERS and as a proportion of the global population, more people know how to read today than at any other moment in history. And yet if we consider literacy not as the ability to parse simple sentences but as the capacity to comprehend and enjoy complex texts, and ultimately as a sensibility that approaches the world itself as a text that requires interpretation, it’s obvious we live in an unprecedented decline of what neuroscientist Maryanne Wolf calls “deep literacy.” The manifestations of this catastrophe range from the rise of psychotic conspiracy theories to the return of state propaganda and the collapse of the public sphere. The crisis comes into view most clearly, however, in the sudden and precipitous decline of the cultural practice that first taught all of us how to read the great book of the world. There’s no point in denying it anymore: literature as we know it is well on its way to becoming a lost art.

Consider, for instance, the distressing state of reading and writing in the United States. I disagree with Philip Roth’s 2009 dictum that the novel will soon become a “cultic” concern, not because I believe that literary fiction is enjoying some sort of heyday in the core of the American empire but rather because I’m convinced that literature has always been an esoteric practice in the United States. At the time of his death, Roth was more famous than almost any living American literary writer, but that’s just a convoluted way of saying that his influence on the wider culture was insignificant. Unlike Gabriel García Márquez, he never became the voice of the nation, or indeed of the language—not for lack of talent or dedication but because the United States reserves those roles for musicians such as Bob Dylan, the only Nobel laureate in literature so far to work primarily in an oral tradition. In the decade and a half that has elapsed since Roth prophesied the retreat of the American novel into the windowless temple of a marginal sect of schismatics, literature in the United States and the English-speaking world has deteriorated at a faster rate than our warming planet. As evidence, consider a selection from the fifty works of fiction that since 2020 have appeared in Publishers Weekly’s annual list of U.S. bestsellers: Dog Man: Grime and Punishment, Dog Man: Twenty Thousand Fleas Under the Sea, Dog Man: Fetch-22, Dog Man: Mothering Heights, and Dog Man: The Scarlet Shredder. That graphic novels meant to help children learn how to read make up such a large proportion of the U.S. publishing market might suggest that most American adults lose all interest in literature as soon as they’re done with basic alphabetization.

The state of anglophone literature is so dire that thinking about the decline of American letters at this point no longer induces despair, only irritation and boredom. In an effort to shake off that ennui and to escape the grip of U.S. cultural hegemony, if only briefly, The Baffler has commissioned seven writers who work in languages other than English for dispatches on the state of postliteracy in their motherlands and mother tongues.

These correspondents’ reports are refreshing in that they are entirely free of the commonplaces with which Americans tend to explain the decline of the written word—e.g., mistaking the symptom for the illness and blaming ChatGPT for students’ plummeting reading-comprehension skills, as if people hadn’t begun to forget how to read long before Faustian Markov-chain machines became the fetish object of an apocalyptic theology—and remind us that there are more things on heaven and Earth than are dreamt of in American publishing offices, where people believe that reading literature in translation is evidence of worldly sophistication rather than the refuge of the monolingual.

But it’s my unfortunate duty to warn the reader that the essays of this dossier offer few reasons for hope. From South Korea to Sudan, China to Mexico, Morocco to the Philippines, literature seems to be in retreat. The worst part is that, while every unhappy literature is unhappy in its own way, the various dystopias that our correspondents describe seem to be converging into a single literary catastrophe. And though the causes for our common predicament that these writers offer vary wildly, it’s possible to discern a terrifying trend: the loss of deep literacy is not an organic development or an accident without an author but rather the intentional consequence of concrete actions undertaken by the unholy alliance of capital and the state, which has availed itself of technology to slowly erode our capacity to understand what we read—and therefore to imagine a more just future.

Depressing, I know. But as Gramsci taught us, despair turns us into reactionaries. It’d be naive to pretend that reading a novel or translating a poem can be a form of resistance. But who knows? Perhaps reinventing the old literary forms could help us reverse the current moment’s drive to stupidity. Better to be cultic than dumb.

If you found this even mildly interesting or entertaining, you really ought to check out the dossier. The essays are all excellent and insightful and worth your time. If nothing else, I can guarantee that they’re almost certainly less stupid than your Twitter feed!

Your Most Foreign Correspondent,

NMMP

Dear friends,

Forgive me, for I’ve been delinquent, indolent, etc! I was supposed to write to you last week to share some great news: “The NAFTA Novel,” the Big Piece that I’ve been working on for the past many months, is finally out! I’m really proud of this essay—I think it might be the best criticism I’ve published since That Time I became Obsessed With Heriberto Yépez—in no small part because it marks my debut in the esteemed pages of The Baffler, which is low-key a dream come true for Your Correspondent.

The essay is about, you guessed it, the literature that emerged from the North American Free Trade Agreement, which loyal readers of Foreign Correspondence know is my favorite subject. It’s an honest attempt to offer a Marxist-adjacent interpretation of recent novels by three of the most accomplished Mexican writers of our time: Yuri Herrera, Valeria Luiselli, and Álvaro Enrigue. I admire all three (though not equally, of course: if you are familiar with América del Norte, which as I hope the end of the essay makes clear is very much not a NAFTA Novel, you’ll know that I have a bad case of the anxiety of influence viz. one of them) and hope to have done them justice, even or especially when I had less than hagiographic things to say about their work.

But I’d be dishonest if I didn’t admit that this essay was animated not just by my admiration for three Mexican novelists, but also by my displeasure with two American academics who I don’t feel the need to name. Suffice it to say that they wrote about my work (and about me, which is very silly of them: I thought by this point only BookTokers or whatever they call themselves hadn’t gotten the memo that works of autofiction are not memoirs masquerading as novels but novels masquerading as memoirs, though now I know that holding a doctorate offers no immunity against interpretative habits most of us outgrow in middle school) in lazy, anti-intellectual ways that I found nothing short of infuriating. This might be hard to believe, given that I’m writing to complain about my critics, but I generally don’t mind it when people dislike my novel (though I of course mind it very much when people who make their living reading and writing but haven’t bothered to read even just a few pages from my book take to the internet to say that my novel is so aesthetically atrocious and politically evil that it shouldn’t have ever existed, just as I’m obviously hurt each time I discover that people whom I’ve never met hate not just my work, but also myself—and not because of anything I’ve done, but simply because I had the bad luck of having a politician for a father). In fact, I tend to feel flattered when someone cares enough about my work to write about it, even if only to express their disapproval, and I’ve often felt a great deal of gratitude for critics who wrote shall-we-say-mixed reviews of the novel. After all, those are the ones that help you get better!

In that spirit, I’d like to briefly thank some of these critics. Nick Burns absolutely clocked me when he pointed out that the two sides of my novel—“a literary CV in the American context, and the diary of a junior in the Mexican one,” he calls them—are incoherent viz. one another. While I’d like to think that the contradictions he points out are what the book is about, the disappointment he expressed has given me energy to make sure my second novel is good enough to please him. Likewise, Luis Madrigal is spot-on when he points out that América del Norte is “a form of compromise” in the face of the “unsolvable contradiction” between the protagonist’s desire to be at once “the American writer of pleasurable autofiction and the highbrow, ‘universal’ essayist; both a ‘reporter,’ humbly at the service of the reader, and an ‘insufferable pedant,’ at the service of his whims.” My book is indeed an account of a failed attempt to mediate between Mexican and American literary traditions, but I recognize that the risk of making a theme of that failed compromise is to wind up compromised yourself. Finally, Ricardo Espinosa’s podcast-review and Sofía Garnica’s long essay on the contemporary Latin American bildungsroman both offered measured praise for the baroque impulses of América del Norte, yet also expressed frustration with what Espinosa calls my “sensibility deformed by Hollywood” and my “capitulation to the American gaze,” which both he and Garnica believe have led me to fall prey to the temptations of plot. I personally think movies are great fun, but I agree that the American side of my dialectic (the realist autobiographical narrative) probably turned out to be more incompatible with the Mexican side (the baroque essayistic form) than I would have hoped.

That all four critical reviewers are in one way or another saying the same thing (namely: that América del Norte cannot decide whether it wants to be a Mexican novel of ideas or an American work of autofiction) suggests that they are in the right. Hence why I’m trying to take my second novel, tentatively titled The Third Empire, in an entirely different direction: it takes place mostly in Europe and dramatizes a movement away from lucid autobiography toward speculative derangement. But while I’m happy to have an occasion to thank these critics for helping me see where I came up short and how I could do better next time (don’t get me wrong, I think my first novel is pretty good, but for all my egomania I can also recognize that it’s a flawed work—which makes sense, considering I’d never done it before), I’ll confess I’m mortified by what I’ve written here so far. Talking about your own work is never a good look, and admitting in public that you Have Feelings about what others have made of it is a Big Faux-Pas. Hence why I’ve decided to spare you the vast majority of the many thousands of words that I drafted over the past few months in response to the Anonymous American Academics (you can thank Enrigue for that: when I wrote to him to send him my essay, he replied kindly to let me know me that he’d never tell me what he thought of the piece, because he’s a firm believer in Truman Capote’s notion that one should never respond to criticism of one’s work, positive or negative). This letter, it turns out, is yet another example of those uneasy compromises between contradictory impulses that I apparently like so much. This, however, I will say: if you are going to write about literature from a Marxist or leftist perspective, you need to make sure to get your political economy and your ideological critique right.

For instance: one of the Anonymous American Academics (or AAAs, as they’re known in the industry parlance) seems to be under the impression that white Iowans suffered a great deal from NAFTA, when in fact you can make a good argument that they were its single greatest beneficiaries. As the essay I’m sharing with you points out:

Between 1994 and 1998, the first four years when NAFTA was in effect, tens of thousands of Mexican small businesses went bankrupt, many of which were replaced by deregulated sweatshops. Farms located on communal lands redistributed in the wake of the revolution had been protected from predatory investors by the country’s constitution, but Salinas struck down those safeguards to get the Americans to negotiate. Then, between the early 1990s and 2006, corn imports from the United States grew by over 400 percent. The subsidies the United States paid American farmers meant that corn was sold in Mexico for an average of 19 percent less than its cost of production. The millions of Mexicans who lost their livelihoods were forced to take their labor to the United States. And as the number of Mexicans living in America nearly tripled over two decades, gringos who already hated them in the abstract found concrete reasons for their hatred: they now had to compete for ever-lower wages with undocumented Mexicans.

It’s true that there used to be a handful of manufacturing hubs in Iowa, mostly clustered around the Mississippi near the border with Illinois, and it’s also true that many of them closed in the wake of NAFTA. But the vast majority of Iowa land is dedicated to medium and large-scale agriculture of staple commodity crops, particularly corn and soybeans, or else to factory farms and meatpacking operations. What’s more, the landowners and agribusinesses of the region live under a de-facto planned economy, wherein the United States government guarantees them profit margins large enough to make state a perfect case study in irrational overproduction. Nobody knew what to do with all that corn—why else would someone think to distill the grain into vodka, mix it with gasoline, and then use the resulting biomass Negroni to power cars?—until NAFTA came along and offered a solution: to sell the excess production in markets south of the border. The punchline is that, since young Iowans don’t like living in Iowa all that much and often leave for greener non-pastures as soon as they are able, the state has long faced difficulties filling job vacancies. Luckily for the farmers, the conjugation of agricultural subsidies and a treaty that guarantees the free movement of goods across the border promptly filled the parking lots of Iowa’s Home Depots with Mexican farmhands in need of work. Since the treaty did not include anything resembling immigration reform, these farmhands were a kulak’s dream: they couldn’t unionize, they can be paid less than the minimum wage, and they couldn’t complaining to the authorities about unsafe or exploitative working conditions, lest they find themselves deported back to the Mexican colonies. If you want to find the American victims of NAFTA, you’d have to drive many miles north of Iowa City and talk to Black autoworkers in Detroit, or else head east and take a tour of rusty Gary, Indiana, and bleak Dayton, Ohio.

The only way you can confidently assert that Iowans became Trumpistas because they were screwed over by Mexican neoliberalism, as the AAA does in the piece in which he informs me that “the only decent thing to do would be to kill [my]self",” is if you have never felt the need to read anything about the Famous Material Conditions. Going off vibes in this way betrays you as intellectually lazy, but it does have it’s uses. In the case of our AAA, the fantasy that white American grievances are the product of the Mexican elite’s machinations allows him to side with the likes of Dylan Roof’s father with a good conscience (crazy, I know, but if you’ve read the AAA’s essay you know I’m not making it up!). I think it’s great that many American leftists finally feel they have space to present long-overdue critiques of US identity-liberalism. But to think, as this AAA says he does, that the lives of poor Americans are so similar to those of poor Mexicans that even a white supremacist could become “a comrade of the Mexican working class” if only he “blown [my] brains out” with a shotgun is—what’s the word?—incredibly stupid. The lives of poor Mexicans are nothing like the lives of poor Americans: they are much, much, much worse! I cannot even imagine what it would be like to live on the Iowa minimum hourly wage of the 7.25 USD per hour—but I can imagine even less what it would be like to try to live on less than 2 USD per day, as do millions of Mexicans. If nothing else, this difference explains why so many Mexicans feel compelled to move to places like Iowa to grow corn for the white farmers for whom our AAA feels so much empathy: turns out that, even if your lack of papers allows your employers to pay you even less than the unlivable minimum wage, the lives of poor Americans are so much better than those of poor Mexicans that people are willing to risk death in the desert or internment in a concentration camp to become poor Americans.

These horrors, of course, are partly due to NAFTA and thus to Mexican neoliberalism. But they are mostly—and obviously!—the product of American neoliberalism, which in this context amounts to an ungodly combination of subsidies for white landowners and immigration restrictions for brown farmhands. That’s why I will always insist that we cannot understand North American neoliberalism without accounting for the vast asymmetries of economic power and military force that determine the nature of the relationship between the signatories of NAFTA. There’s even a name for this political-economic arrangement: American imperialism. Or as the cool kids like to call it: the highest stage of capitalism. Alas, it would seem that these AAAs prefer not to read their Lenin: it gets in the way of the solidarity-fantasies that allow them to convince themselves that they are on the right side of history, even when they are being kinda-low-key racist—and not only that, but also to flatter themselves with the notion that their “intellectual labor” is nothing short of revolutionary, a solution to the dialectical contradiction between theory and praxis, interpreting the world in order to change it, etc. But I’m afraid that not-reading is, well, bad praxis, first of all because it leads you to develop bad theories (let’s be real: white supremacists would rather eat their own shotguns than become “comrades of the Mexican working classes”), or else to embarrass your profession by citing your own prejudices in MLA format: “(I assume)”.

See, for example, the other AAA, who has studied Mexican literature and culture so extensively that he didn’t need to read my Spanish-language political essays in nexos to know that, if I get published in leftist American venues like The Baffler or n+1, it’s because I’ve tricked my US editors into thinking that I’m a “progressive,” even though I’m secretly a Mexican reactionary. Had this AAA bothered to, you know, do the reading, he might have discovered that, contrary to what the first AAA’s Morena handlers instructed him to believe, being published in nexos or retaining institutional ties to the magazine does not make one a reactionary. I found that claim offensive because, well, I worked at the damned joint for seven years of my life, during which I did everything in my power to bring the magazine back to its socialist roots. What can I tell you? I figured the best thing I could do for the cause, from my position and with my talents, was to work my ass off to make sure the Mexican public sphere included a venue for leftist critiques of the Mexican state. It’s true that the longtime editor in chief—my former boss, Héctor Aguilar Camín—has drifted away from his leftist origins and supported a conservative candidate in last year’s presidential election, but he nonetheless let me do such things as publish cover stories urging Claudia Sheinbaum to take such reactionary measures as raising taxes on people like Your Correspondent, which so far her (rather neoliberal) government has (rather neoliberally refused to do).

The ideological ambiguity of Morena, a leftist party that refuses to raise taxes and dismantles social welfare institutions to replace them with direct cash transfers that people then use to pay for the services the state used to provide, is illustrative of the complexities of Mexican politics that AAAs don’t bother to notice. This willful or indolent ignorance makes sense: as I’m sure some of them would admit, white American professors have a hard time shedding their imperial worldview even when praising the people of so-called Latin America. At any rate, these two AAAs know so little about their alleged field of study that they don’t appear to suspect that the notion that nexos is a nest of right-wingers is too simplistic to take seriously except as state propaganda designed to neutralize critics of the ruling party.

As evidence, I submit that, as the magazine’s readers can attest, nexos routinely publishes writers who are openly aligned with Morena or else make claims antithetical to the ideologies of the PAN and the PRI, the parties that that the second AAA insists I am aligned with (that would be my father—turns out he and I are actually not the same person!). Here’s the feminist theorist Marta Lamas making a case against trans-exclusionary radical feminism. Here’s the heterodox economist Gerardo Esquivel gently warning Sheinbaum about the urgent need to raise taxes. Here’s the historian Ariel Rodríguez Kuri’s regular political column, which he usually dedicates to mocking the opposition to Morena. Here’s the Marxist sociologist Gerado Otero presenting a quantitative case for the harm that NAFTA caused the North American working classes (spoiler: American workers fared far better than their Mexicans equivalents). Here’s the literary scholar Ignacio Sánchez-Prado on the calamitous effects of neoliberalism on the Mexican film industry. As for foreign contributors, nexos has published countless American academics with impeccable leftist credentials, among them Christy Thornton, Gabriel Winant, and David Kurnick. It has also given a platform to younger leftist writers, among them Federico Perelmuter, Caroline Tracey, and Natalia Reyes.

To say that all of these authors—and the substantial portion of the Mexican intelligentsia that regularly writes for the magazine—share Héctor Aguilar Camín’s political views is as nonsensical as saying that every AAA necessarily shares the opinions of the university presidents who one gets the sense are just thrilled to finally have a chance to throw both their students and faculty colleagues under the Trumpist bus. The good news is that, if the AAAs are right and I’m wrong, this populist revolt of the white American worker against the unaccountable PMC POC PhDs of the Ivory Tower-League Country Club for Wealthy Foreigners from China, Mexico, and the Elite-Captured Coasts will probably wind up benefiting poor Mexicans in some unspecified way, the nature of which I confess to be too much of a rentier to guess without their help. Even in that case, however, the fact remains that, if you claim to be interested in the “sociology of literature,” you best make at least a half-hearted effort to research the ideological makeup of the social groups in which the literature that interests you is inscribed.

Alright, that’s enough, that’s plenty, I really should stop now! I already ignored Enrigue’s sensible advice, which I can tell even now is probably a bad idea. At any rate, if you care to consider a third path for leftist literary criticism that understands that ideological critique requires granular considerations of writers’ class backgrounds rather than hand-wringing about their family backgrounds or the politics of their former employer and that begins from the premise that accounting for political economy when examining cultural objects demands that one ponder commodity prices instead of repeating clichés about the White Working Class That Loved Foreigners Until Obama Bailed Out Wall Street, take a look at “The NAFTA Novel.” To whet your appetite and induce you to subscribe to The Baffler, here’s a bit from the top of the essay:

In the summer of 1988, while Margaret Thatcher destroyed a society she insisted didn’t exist, Deng Xiaoping synthesized Mencius with Hayek, and Mikhail Gorbachev unmade the Soviet Union, the Mexican bourgeoisie partook of its third-favorite pastime after binge drinking and short selling: literary blood sport. The historian Enrique Krauze—a sycophantic surrogate of Octavio Paz, the poet-dictator who traded antifascism for anticommunism as he angled for the Nobel—had taken a hatchet to the novelist-caudillo Carlos Fuentes, arguing in a long essay that the writer who had become “everyone’s favorite Mexican” in the United States was “a foreigner in his own country.”

The takedown was vicious even by the standards of the Mexican Republic of Letters, where feuds reach levels of animosity unthinkable in countries where criticism is understood to be about writing, not writers. To his credit, Krauze admitted that his “discomfort with Fuentes” was no longer “intellectual or literary, but moral.” The novelist, he explained, was “a gringo child of Mexican origin.” Having grown up in a diplomatic family in Washington, D.C., Fuentes saw Mexico “refracted through a North American perspective.” That last phrase sounds odd in English but is only mildly retro in Spanish: norteamericano as a demonym for the United States was still common in the 1980s. But why not say una perspectiva estadounidense, angloamericana, yanqui, even gringa? Wasn’t Mexico also part of North America?

The Pazian-Fuentista Conflict was so overblown that even the Los Angeles Times felt compelled to cover it, noting some of the writers involved had “ceased speaking to each other.” That’s because Krauze’s essay was an unwitting expression of the political anxieties of the moment. While the idea of a free-trade agreement with the United States had yet to seduce the Harvard PhD who was about to become president of Mexico, the political unconscious of the Mexican Republic of Letters already sensed that it would confront an unsettling question: Can one still conceive of Mexican literature independently of the United States?

Krauze’s hatchet job was published simultaneously in Paz’s Vuelta and Leon Wieseltier’s New Republic. The English rendition was the work of Edith Grossman, the translator of Mario Vargas Llosa, Gabriel García Márquez, and Carlos Fuentes. Krauze’s broadside, in other words, was processed by the same machinery that transformed his bête noir’s dense Spanish prose into a delicacy fit for palates reared on Iowa corniness. Consider two telling deletions from this line, which quotes Fuentes:

“México ‘el país imaginado e imaginario’, no era una nación tangible, histórica. Era sólo una víctima de los Estados Unidos y una lengua por conquistar.”

A literal-minded translator might render the passage as follows:

“Mexico, ‘the imaginary, imagined country,’ was not a tangible, historical nation. It was only a victim of the United States and a language waiting to be conquered.”

Yet the translation published in The New Republic reads:

“Mexico, the ‘imaginary, imagined country,’ was not a tangible, historical nation. It was only a victim of imperialism, an instrumental reality, a language.”

Even though Krauze is describing Fuentes’s view, The New Republic wouldn’t print a sentence in which the United States is identified as Mexico’s oppressor, perplexingly replacing the nation’s name with the vague “imperialism.” Likewise with the deletion of “conquered,” which in the original figures Fuentes the gringo as a colonial adventurer, pillaging Mexico’s linguistic wealth. The process of being translated into English had refracted Krauze’s views through a U.S.-centric perspective, turning him into what he despised: a North American writer.

The irony was lost on Krauze, but his “discomfort” contemplating a Mexican writer’s turn toward the United States proved prophetic. Over the course of the 1990s, Mexicans would experience the traumatic metamorphosis known as the North American Free Trade Agreement. At the end of that decade, Carlos Salinas—president of Mexico from 1988 to 1994 and one of the architects of NAFTA—would title his memoirs México: un paso difícil a la modernidad. But the future into which this reader of Mao and Gramsci plunged his country looked strangely like the era before the Mexican Revolution. Peasants lost the communal lands their grandparents had clawed back from haciendas; workers discovered that labor rights were meaningless if industries went bankrupt. Nurses became nannies; artisans, gardeners; smugglers, kingpins. Salinas and his mandarins—the bureaucrat-intellectuals who had ruled Mexico for most of the twentieth century—promised that NAFTA would mark the nation’s triumphant entrance into the first world. Instead, the Mexican economy’s sudden exposure to American capital, along with the financial meltdown that ensued from its leaders’ shortsighted attempt to hold onto power, drove millions of Mexicans to migrate to the United States.

Most went because they didn’t want to starve, but a small minority left of their own accord. Not all of the latter camp were wealthy, but none were destitute. They had sufficient English and cultural capital to secure admission to American universities. After graduation, many stayed. Four decades after the Pazian-Fuentista Conflict, some of the most accomplished contemporary Mexican novelists—among them Yuri Herrera, Valeria Luiselli, and Álvaro Enrigue—live and work in the United States. The experience of having their subjectivity decentered by a comfortable migration forced them to embrace a contradictory position that allowed them to face the United States and Mexico at the same time: the North American perspective.

Thank you for indulging my antics, Your Mercies, and please accept my apologies for the Big Faux Pas. I promise it won’t happen ever again: from now on, in this house we live by the Capote Rule. I remain, as always, Your Most Foreign Correspondent,

NMM

PS — To my bewilderment, considering the not-very-nice things I had to say about the state in the book, the Iowa chapter of the Library of Congress’ Center for the Book has selected América del Norte to represent the state in this year’s edition of the National Book Festival. The good people at the Ames Public Library have organized a virtual event on September 16 where I’ll read from the book and answer a few questions. It’s probably the last event I’ll ever do for the novel (and I promise this is the last time I mention it in this newsletter: I’m done with the damn thing and making good progress on the second one, so it’s time to let it go!) and I would love to see you there

Dear Friends,

It appears I have landed myself in a wee little controversy by writing a shall-we-say-mixed review of a bestselling book about the history of Latin America. I should have seen it coming: none of my unpopular opinions have gotten me into more trouble than my hardline stance against the widespread superstition that the 650 million human beings who live in so-called “Latin America” belong to the same culture—or worse, share the same “worldview.”

Consider your own gut reaction to the phrase “the Latin American essence.” If you came across it in an essay, you would have good reason to suspect that the author is the Type of Guy who gets drunk at your dinner party and proceeds to defend the merits of phrenology. And yet each time we invoke the term “Latin America”, we implicitly posit the existence of such an essence: a defining characteristic shared by the millions of people who live in the rather large area between the Río Bravo and the Antarctic reaches of Patagonia.

But let’s pretend you want to defend the concept. You could say that the essence of “Latin America” is linguistic. After all, the people of the region speak Spanish and Portuguese, which means they have more in common than Africans or Europeans. But you would stumble upon a problem: Many in the region speak Indigenous languages in addition to or instead of Latinate ones. And by “many,” I mean many: There are ten million speakers of Quechua, three million more than of Catalán; there are roughly as many speakers of Mayan languages as there are speakers of Danish; speakers of Nahuatl are three times more numerous than speakers of Yiddish. The notion that “Latin America” is more linguistically homogenous than Europe is simply false.

But let’s pretend you insist. You could say that the essence of “Latin America” is religious. After all, the people of the region are Catholics. But even if we set aside the fact that a growing number of “Latin Americans” are Protestants or atheists, your argument would eventually lead you to expand the porous limits of “latinidad” to include not just the Italianx, but also the Poles and the Irish. And were you to invite one of these newly minted Latines to the parish church in San Juan Chamula, they would cross themselves and flee, muttering cruses against heretics and bemoaning the end of the Inquisition.

But let’s pretend your stubbornness has no limits. You could say the essence of “Latin America” consists of a shared history of resistance against colonialism and empire. That sounds more sophisticated than the other options, but I’m afraid it’s even more fallacious. If you were to write a history of the region to justify your stance, you’d have to cherry-pick your way through half a millennium’s worth of contradictions—and no serious historian would lend their good name to such a project. Right?

I’m afraid not. Greg Grandin, a venerable scholar who has written some serious books and some less serious ones, has just published the history I described. And as card-carrying Great Knower of Mexico, I was contractually obliged to review it for Dissent. Hence the wee little controversy: as those of you who still have Twitter accounts know, Grandin is a grumpy fellow who tends to yell at anyone who has anything other than hyperbolic praise for him. Since the review isn’t paywalled on the Dissent website, I’m sharing it in full—but please, please, please make sure to click on this here link and help the dissenters keep the lights on!

[A note written under duress, while my literary agent held a gun to my head: Before you scroll down, I have a shameless plug—well, more like a shameful plug, seeing that I am endlessly mortified by this sort of exercise—to which I must unfortunately subject you. The paperback edition of my novel, América del Norte, came out in April. I was supposed to let you know back then, but to be honest with you I was distracted with a bunch of deadlines. In the event you want a reminder of what the book is about, you can listen to this episode of Geraldo Cadava’s podcast at Public Books, where he and I discuss it at some length. Regardless of whether you know what it’s about, though, you should buy it—and not just once, mind you: You should buy several copies. Trust me, I have in mind only your interests. Everyone knows it’s a matter of time, a few decades at most, before the philistines of the Swedish Committee recognize that my debut is a work of genius. Just think of the exorbitant profits you will earn by reselling a few crates of the soon-to-be-collectible paperback!]

OK, that was awful for everyone involved, wasn’t it? Let’s forget it ever happened and return to our regular program:

American Ideologies

America, América
by Greg Grandin
Penguin Press, 2025, 768 pp.

In a series of lectures on the philosophy of history delivered in the 1820s, around the time Spain’s colonies in the Western Hemisphere were declaring independence, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel declared that America was “the land of the future.” For those “weary of the historical lumber-room of old Europe,” the New World promised a chance “to abandon the ground on which hitherto World History has developed.” But this potential to break free from the past wasn’t evenly distributed across the Americas. In the part of the hemisphere that had been “colonized” by Protestants, where “all citizens” were of “European descent,” Hegel found “an increase of industry and population, civil order, and firm freedom.” By contrast, in the region that had been “conquered” by Catholics, where the friars had “proposed to accustom the Indians to European culture,” he saw nothing but “a continued revolution.”

The divergence of the two Americas struck the philosopher as a far more consequential distinction than a difference of culture; it was a contradiction between concepts. This position was consistent with Hegel’s metaphysical idealism, which saw the mind not as a subjective reflection of the material world but as objective reality itself, and which therefore conceived of history as a collective journey toward self-understanding. In this scheme, the growing tensions between the Protestant and Catholic regions of the New World were bound to explode not because the interests of their peoples were at odds, but because the two Americas embodied incompatible ways of being human. And if America was the future of humanity, the United States was the future of America.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Greg Grandin’s monumental new work, America, América, is a dialectical reversal of Hegel’s ideas about the history of the New World. Taking as a point of departure the commonplace that the Spanish word americano can refer to a person from any part of the Americas, while the English term American refers only to people from the United States, the book is a history of the Western Hemisphere—“all of it: from the Spanish Conquest” to “the United Nations and beyond.”

Such a project would be an ambitious undertaking in a single volume, even one that stretches over 700 pages, but Grandin has something even bigger in mind. His book, he writes, is also “a history of the modern world, an inquiry into how centuries of American bloodshed and diplomacy” have given form to our own era’s moribund “liberal international order.” Still, even the most totalizing narrative must approach its object from a particular angle, so Grandin has chosen to focus on “the New World’s long history of ideological and ethical contestation.”

America, América, then, is not so much a history of ideas as it is an idealist history. When Grandin writes that both Simón Bolívar and Thomas Jefferson considered America “more an ideal than a place,” he might as well be describing Hegel—or himself. The crucial difference is that Grandin inverts the German philosopher’s moral hierarchy. In Grandin’s scheme, it is Latin America, not the United States, that holds the key to the future of humanity.

There is much to admire in America, América. Grandin is just as adept at guiding the reader through theological disputations in early modern Spain as he is at relating the tensions within Franklin D. Roosevelt’s State Department. The chapter dedicated to colonial New England has something of Susan Howe; the section about the 1948 murder of Colombian populist Jorge Eliécer Gaitán reminds me of Gabriel García Márquez’s literary journalism. Unlike many academics, Grandin can write a sentence and tell a story. I feel compelled to pay America, América the highest compliment I can offer: it is a work of literature.

More than anything else, Grandin should be commended for his vindication of what he calls “Latin America’s worldview.” In his scheme, the region’s “humanist” approach to politics—along with economics, literature, theology, diplomacy, ethnic inclusion, social welfare, and above all international law—constitutes a “remarkably coherent” rebuttal to the imperialist ideology of the United States. Now that the country that hubristically calls itself America has yet again been taken hostage by a clique of dime-store Eichmanns, it’s heartening to watch a U.S. historian conjure the spirit of Bartolomé de las Casas, the sixteenth-century Spanish friar who dedicated his life to defending the Indigenous peoples of the New World from the abuses of European colonizers.

Yet America, América is ultimately disappointing. Essentializing millions of people from dozens of cultures that seem similar only when considered from the perspective of the United States—even if it is to vindicate them—is another form of imperial condescension.

Though America, América features as large a cast of characters as one would expect from a work of history that aspires to synthesize the development of an entire hemisphere over the course of half a millennium, Las Casas is very much the book’s central figure. In an early chapter, one of the book’s best, Grandin gives the reader a guided tour of the priest’s life and miracles: his conversion from slaveholding settler to abolitionist agitator, his repurposing of Catholic canon law to argue for the sovereignty of Indigenous nations, and his rebuttal of neo-Aristotelian arguments for “natural slavery.”

Yet the friar has a long afterlife in America, América. Grandin returns to him throughout the book, to the point that “Las Casas” soon strikes the reader less as the name of an individual than as a leitmotif designed to bring to the fore the supposed coherence of Latin America’s humanist worldview. Like Hegel, Grandin explains the world by dividing it into binaries of theses and antitheses. The most important of these pairings is the contrast between Las Casas’s Catholic universalism and the Protestant particularism of the likes of Cotton Mather. Though Grandin certainly grants that material factors played an important role in shaping the political economies of the British and Spanish empires—he notes that by the time the first English settlers landed in Massachusetts, pathogens brought by the Spaniards had already killed some 90 percent of the Indigenous population—he also seems to think that theological beliefs can explain why the Spanish tried to assimilate the people they had conquered while the English decided to displace or exterminate them.

One need not appeal to the difference between consubstantiation and transubstantiation to account for these two versions of hell. The Indigenous societies that each group of settlers encountered were themselves quite different. Where the Spaniards met so-called complex societies, as they did in present-day Mexico and Peru, they found it expedient to graft their colonial regime onto the pre-existing structures of the Mexica and Inca states; where they found hunter-gatherers or “simple” sedentary groups, as they did in the Antilles, they behaved much like their Protestant rivals. Under this alternative explanation, Mather and Las Casas’s antithetical theologies appear not as etiologies of different illnesses but rather as symptoms of the same disease.

America, América makes a great deal of the fact that some of the former Spanish colonies abolished chattel slavery long before the United States, noting with approval that Mexico became a haven for enslaved Black people fleeing the American South. But many scholars now believe that the abolition of chattel slavery in former New Spain had very little to do with humanist ideas and everything to do with the fact that the country’s white elite discovered that it was simply more profitable to exploit Indigenous labor through debt-bondage—which, according to Las Casas, is simply another kind of slavery—such that, by the time the viceroyalty became the first Mexican Empire and then the Mexican Republic, there were very few enslaved people of African descent living in its territory. Had the criollos of early independent Mexico been sugarcane planters rather than silver-mining barons—and had they not needed to recruit people of all castes during the War of Independence—it’s likely that they would have persisted in enslaving Black people for much longer, as was the case in Brazil, Cuba, and the American South.

A teacher of mine used to say that one should always be suspicious when historians use the phrase “what we now would call” to qualify their use of a concept that didn’t exist in the period under consideration, because such sleights of hand insert a hidden teleology into history. In his chapter on Las Casas, Grandin performs this magic trick with “social justice” and “structural violence,” presumably to make the friar’s ideas easier to understand. The truth, however, is that Las Casas was neither a structuralist avant la lettre nor a proto-activist. To imply otherwise prevents us from grasping the radical foreignness of a thinker for whom the fight against oppression was not so much a matter of life and death as a question of heaven and hell.

There’s no question that Las Casas’s ideas are inspiring. But Grandin’s insistence on reading the friar as a precursor to Bolívar and company showcases the tendencies that make America, América a great polemic against U.S. reactionaries and a reactionary history of Latin America. When Bolívar or the liberation theologians cite Las Casas, they are not discovering a precedent but giving voice to the contradictions of their own ages.

These objections may seem minor, particularly given that the more sophisticated version of Grandin’s argument for Las Casas’s importance—that his writings were an important inspiration for modern international law—isn’t especially controversial. Authors as ideologically diverse as Enrique Dussel and Rolena Adorno have made similar claims, as did many of the Latin American jurists who developed much of that legal framework. Grandin dedicates a considerable portion of the book to these jurists, to the point that America, América at times seems to want to be a much more circumscribed inquiry: an exploration of the Latin American origins of a body of legislation that so far has failed to protect the wretched of the earth from the likes of Henry Kissinger.

But Grandin dramatically expands Las Casas’s sphere of influence. In America, América, the friar is not just the grandfather of international law, but also the source of a Latin American Spirit that flies over the muck and mire of the centuries, leaving trails in the pristine skies of the realm of ideas, connecting everyone from Bolívar to García Márquez. But what are we to make of the fact that the latter’s novel about the former, The General in His Labyrinth, is an ambivalent entry in the canon known as the “novel of the dictator”? What goes for García Márquez and Bolívar goes for countless others. Grandin writes in similar terms about Mexico’s Lázaro Cárdenas and Chile’s Salvador Allende, implicitly suggesting that both leaders belong to the same pantheon of Latin American humanists, even though the former was a general who consolidated an authoritarian party and the latter a democratically elected civilian who was ousted by an authoritarian general.

The problem is not just that Grandin thinks that Latin Americans are essentially the same, but that he seems convinced that they are essentially good. This idealization comes into view each time he avoids the painfully evident fact that the region has produced a veritable legion of anti-humanist thinkers and unethical leaders. Just as Las Casas was a product of the same culture as Hernán Cortés, Augusto Pinochet was every bit as Chilean as Allende. Yet over and over again, Grandin implies that Latin American reactionaries were not really Latin American, because they had fallen prey to the nefarious influence of the United States.

This position leads Grandin to present interpretations of crucial events that are too simplistic to be taken seriously. His narrative of the military coup that in 1913 triggered the most violent phase of the Mexican Revolution, for instance, attributes an outsize importance to the U.S. Ambassador Henry Lane Wilson. The American diplomat met and likely bribed General Victoriano Huerta shortly before the latter ordered the killing of President Francisco I. Madero, the democratically elected liberal aristocrat who, less than two years earlier, had ousted longtime liberal dictator Porfirio Díaz.

There’s no question that Wilson and his faction in William Howard Taft’s lame-duck government had no qualms about supporting putschists to protect the foreign interests of their country’s capitalist class. But Grandin’s suggestion that “the proximate events leading to the Mexican president’s demise” and hence to civil war were the result of American machinations risks reducing the Mexican Revolution into an anticolonial revolt against the United States. At times it certainly was that, but the decade of chaotic violence that began with Madero’s assassination was at heart the result of class struggles within Mexican society. The only way to present it as yet another episode in the epic struggle between America and América is to brush aside countless inconvenient details and replace the unnerving contradictions of history with the satisfying simplicity of a morality play.

Consider one such detail. The coup that killed Madero in fact began days before the meeting between Wilson and Huerta, when a different general, Bernardo Reyes, Diaz’s right-hand man and heir apparent, escaped from the prison where he was serving a sentence for sedition, ever since his first attempt to overthrow the legitimate government had fizzled out more than a year earlier. The elderly Reyes rallied the troops of a nearby garrison and marched to the National Palace with the intention of deposing Madero and assuming the presidency—only to die moments later in the central plaza of Mexico City, felled by one of the first shots of the revolution.

I bring up Reyes not to raise the pedantic question of whether the coup began on February 9 or February 13, but because the general’s contradictions are illustrative of larger problems in Grandin’s book. A veteran of the war against the puppet Habsburg monarchy that Napoleon III installed in Mexico in the 1860s, Reyes was one of those paradoxical Mexican reactionaries who hoped to impose order not to restore tradition but to usher in modernity. (I would have loved to watch Grandin grapple with this anti-humanist tradition, particularly with the work of José Vasconcelos, the fascist philosopher who in the 1920s laid the cultural groundwork for Cárdenas’s party—and whose Bolivarismo y monroísmo often sounds uncomfortably similar to America, América.)

Like many Mexican reactionaries before and after him, Reyes was an anti-imperialist nationalist who saw the United States as Mexico’s historic enemy. His son, the brilliant essayist Alfonso Reyes, recounts in his memoirs that the only time any of the general’s children saw him cry was when his sister caught him weeping over “certain passages about the Mexican–American War.” The United States, it appears, did not feel warmly about Reyes either: his first attempted coup in late 1911 failed because the American authorities, at the request of Madero’s ambassador, detained the general and his supporters, who had crossed the border to secure weapons and rally their men after Reyes publicly called for rebellion.

Reyes’s anticlimactic death in the first minutes of a civil war that claimed close to a million lives has made him a far more obscure figure than Huerta. But the fact that it was him, and not Huerta, who was supposed to take over as president after Madero had been forced out of the National Palace suggests that the coup that put an end to Madero’s life was an eminently domestic affair: the panicked reaction of a national bourgeoisie that feared for its economic interests after losing control of the state apparatus.

Moreover, if the “proximate” cause for the Mexican Revolution was a precursor to more recent U.S. attempts to overthrow legitimate Latin American governments, as Grandin’s focus on Wilson’s meeting with Huerta suggests, why didn’t Taft’s State Department ignore Madero’s request, or even furnish Reyes with funds and matériel? It’s frustrating to see a committed anti-imperialist like Grandin fall prey to the old temptation of understanding everything that happens in the world in relation to the United States.

Reyes is not the only figure whose inclusion in America, América would have complicated Grandin’s argument. An Andean critic might invoke Peruvian Marxist José Carlos Mariátegui, who thought about the ideological divergence of the United States and Latin America in terms of the difference between the political economies of the British and Spanish empires. A Brazilian reader could reasonably wonder why this history of the New World has more to say about the racial terror that broke loose in Venezuela over the course of a few years during Bolívar’s campaign against Spanish rule than it does about five centuries’ worth of ethnic strife in the most populous nation in Latin America. The fact that countless such objections can be raised means either that this line of criticism is meaningless or that the very premise of a history of “all of it” is catastrophically flawed.

I’m inclined for the first option: I wish more academics were willing to risk objections such as the ones I’ve raised. But there are other absences in America, América that present far more serious problems. Reyes was able to ascend to the highest echelons of the dictatorial regime in great part because of his military distinction in the so-called pacification of northern Mexico—which is a euphemistic way of saying that he proved remarkably efficient in the displacement, dispossession, and mass killing of the Yaqui, Rarámuri, and other Indigenous nations. On this point, more than on any other, Reyes was a true son of Latin America: the independent governments of Chile, Argentina, Brazil, and practically every other nation in the region inflicted and continue to inflict similar violence against a constellation of unrelated peoples to whom Grandin refers to as “Native Americans” or “Indians.”

Many of the conflicts that ensued from this most Latin American tradition of internal colonialism have been described as genocidal; in some cases, contemporary leftist governments that Grandin regards with sympathy have felt the need to offer formal apologies to the survivors of the campaigns that their predecessors waged against their peoples long after independence. But a reader who knew nothing about the region save what they learned in America, América would walk away from the book under the impression that Latin America’s humanism “removed the imperative for genocide: the lines were fixed, and Indigenous peoples—be they Mexico’s Maya, Chile’s Mapuche, or Gran Colombia’s Wayuu—could stay put.”

I read this and other similar lines with incredulity. Does Grandin not know about the so-called Caste Wars, as the Mexican state’s fifty-year exterminationist offensive against a nineteenth-century Maya rebellion is known? Or about the ethnic cleansing that took place around the same time in the territory that is now known as the Araucanía Region of Chile, a territory that according to Las Casas should belong exclusively to the Mapuche? Or, for that matter, about the displacement in our own time of the Wayuu, who have been abandoned to the depredations of drug cartels by the nation-states that claim their land as their own?

Grandin’s refusal to confront the fact that Latin America is full of genocidal anti-humanists leads him to forget that there are countless people in Latin America whose cultures predates the concept of America, whose languages are in no way Latinate, and who to this day continue to resist the abuses of Bolívar’s “humanist” inheritors. Indigenous historical actors play minor roles at best in America, América. Not even towering figures such as Benito Juárez or Evo Morales merit so much as a passing mention. The result is that in this book, as in Hegel’s lectures, “what takes place in America is but an emanation from Europe.”

In the introduction to his recent social history of the Mexican–American War, The Dead March, Peter Guardino writes that “our ideas about the societies we live in are shaped by implicit comparisons.” The problem, he goes on, is that “implicit comparisons are typically sloppy.” The task of the historian, then, is to make comparisons not only “more explicit but also more precise.” Here, I think, is the root of my problem with Grandin’s book: his argument hinges on a binary comparison at such a large scale that it forgoes any specificity. If it proves difficult to say something at once coherent and true about a group of people as diverse as Mexicans, it’s downright impossible to say anything meaningful about Latin America as a whole.

If one forgets that García Márquez’s Colombia is rather unlike Bolívar’s Gran Colombia, the working-class newsman from twentieth-century Bogotá and the aristocratic warlord from nineteenth-century Caracas could be said to be something close to countrymen. But I’m not sure that this observation is any more revealing than pointing out that Abraham Lincoln and Gore Vidal were both born in the United States. Would we be comfortable saying that they shared a worldview? What about Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump, two outer-borough white New Yorkers from the same generation? Don’t the nearly 665 million people who live in the mosaic of fractious nation-states that we call Latin America have the same capacity for political disagreement and moral dissimilarity? There’s a reason why grand narratives that figure history as a series of clashes between antithetical cultures or civilizations—two words that, in this context, are almost always euphemisms for “races”—have long fallen out of fashion: their explanatory power hinges on stereotypical generalizations. This danger is especially acute when we seek to make sense of these clashes between cultures in moral terms.

The decisive blow to Hegel’s philosophy of history, of course, was struck by none other than Karl Marx, who came to think that history was not a matter of a battle of beliefs or ideas, much less a contest between good or evil, but of how societies produce what people need to stay alive. To think otherwise was to fall prey to the same mystification that had led Hegel’s radical young followers to the conclusion that solving philosophical problems would bring justice to the world. Marx began his systematic critique of Hegel’s idealism in a book that he co-authored with Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology. Their project was to turn Hegel on his head by showing that the Spirit was a byproduct of the economy, and not the other way around. Grandin appears to have had something similar in mind in America, América. It’s unfortunate that he instead fell prey to the temptations of the American ideology.

That’s all for now, friends! If it is safe for you to do so, I hope you join the protests against Trump’s anti-immigrant terror. Otherwise, you might wind up convinced that writing 750 pages in which you engage in genocide denial constitutes a brave act of resistance to American fascism.

Your Most Foreign Correspondent,

—NMM

Friends,

It’s been a weird few weeks in América del Norte, huh? Donald “Duck” Trump’s tariff-theatrics are straight from the play book of reality TV, which knows that the key to high ratings is to keep viewers guessing: Will or won’t he nuke the Mexican economy just for the lulz? Will he show mercy once again? Who will get booted from Free Trade Island first, Canada or Mexico? Stay tuned and find out!

Meanwhile, Claudia “Did you know she has a doctorate in climate science” Sheinbaum is also putting up her own show, though hers follows the logic of one of the classic telenovela sub-genres, the patriotic melodrama: Faced yet again with the specter of imperialism, the Mexican people put aside their differences and rallied ‘round the flag, armed with nothing save their dignity and their valor, ready to face the perfidious Americans, happy to know that their inevitable defeat will be glorious, because they are led by a stern yet benevolent stateswoman . . .

Both leaders are benefiting from the show, of course. They are not so much negotiating (can we speak of a negotiation when Mexico has bent over backwards to meet all of Trump’s demands, including deploying more than 10,000 soldiers to deter, detain, deport, and sooner or later disappear some of the most vulnerable migrants and refugees in the hemisphere?) as they are performing for the cameras, each giving their domestic audience what they want. I suspect that they will keep up the charade for as long as they can, Trump because he looks tough without having to actually blow up three decades of regional economic integration, Sheinbaum because, so long as Free Trade Island continues airing new seasons, anything bad that happens in Mexico can be blamed on the Americans. No wonder the two presidents have such a cordial relationship!

But what about the non-ideological stuff, the famous material conditions? I have no idea what’s going to happen!. It’s possible that the tariffs will never be implemented. It’s possible that they will come into effect at the end of the current moratorium. It’s possible that Trump will unilaterally withdraw from the USCMA—the treaty that replaced NAFTA—tomorrow morning. But my boss at Reuters, where I spent a year covering the oil markets, had a little motto that he would repeat whenever the Wall Street Journal or the Financial Times published a long piece about the future: Never predict the price of oil. So let’s sit with the uncertainty, shall we?

That said, I do know that a 25% tax on all Mexican exports to the US would cause unimaginable damage to my country’s economy. I don’t think most people in either Mexico or the US realize just how bad it could be. Consider two very basic figures: exports to the US account for approximately 30% of the Mexican GDP; during the worst year of the Great Depression, the US economy shrank by 10%. Do you see what I mean?

The point of NAFTA, its Mexican architects told my former nexos colleagues and me, was to diversify the economy, which until the late 1980s depended almost entirely on oil exports. This specialization meant that the country was vulnerable to the whims of the crude markets, but also to the policy and diplomatic measures of Saudi Arabia and company. Judging by that rather narrow criteria, the treaty was a resounding success: the Mexican people suffered immensely, of course, but at least now their fortunes wouldn’t be tethered to the price fluctuations of a single commodity. The problem, of course, is that today more than 80% of the increasingly wide range of products exported by Mexico are sold to a single buyer: the United States. In other words: Trump is the new OPEC. We’re oh so very fucked!

OK, we’re done with political economy! We’ll return to our usual literary programing after a brief word from our sponsors and a bit of comic relief. I present to you the anthem of Mexican neoliberalism, that long-dead beast that refuses to die:

Well now, that was uncomfortable. Let’s move on before I start rambling about how everyone should be buying gold.

I’m writing today because The Atlantic just published my review of the English translation of Cristina Rivera Garza’s Death Takes Me, a batshit (by which I mean: really fucking good) novel about castration and the illegibility of poetry that won one of the Hispanophone world’s most prestigious literary prizes (and which I suspect will prove too modernist-weird for an American reading public that has come to expect fiction that reads like the screenplay for an HBO show).

First published in Spanish in 2008 under the title La muerte me da,1 the book purports to be about a series of murders of young men, but the truth is that it’s mostly about psychoanalysis, literary theory, and the Argentine poet Alejandra Pizarnik—and also secretly-but not-so-secretly about femicide. Here are two bits to whet your appetite:

The book’s unabashed intellectualism is the product of Mexican literary culture, which tends to abide by the Cuban writer José Lezama Lima’s famous motto, “Difficulty is the only stimulant.” But readers willing to play by Rivera Garza’s rules can expect a reward commensurate with their efforts, the sort of anti-noir novel that a ghostwriting team comprising Jorge Luis Borges, Jacques Lacan, and Clarice Lispector might deliver in response to a publisher’s request for a true-crime number.

Like the murders it recounts, Death Takes Me resists interpretation, inducing in the reader a disconcerting mixture of numbnes and anxiety. Those familiar with Rivera Garza’s more recent work will soon realize that the book has another, more political dimension. Although it approaches the issue obliquely by reversing the gender of the victims, Death Takes Me is the author’s firs sustained meditation on femicide—and perhaps a preliminary study for the memoir she would publish more than a decade later.

[. . .]

For all the numbness and the horror and the cerebral discussions of poetics, [CRG’s book] is also full of humor. It may well be that the novel’s most important contribution to our moment is that it consciously rejects the language of witnessing, elegy, and moral certainty on display in many contemporary stories about trauma. Death Takes Me, instead, suggests that personal grief and political anger can find expression, too, through ambiguity and irony—and even laughter.

That’s all for now, friends! Remember not to watch the markets and to smash your television into pieces.

Your Most Foreign Correspondent,

NMMP

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Dear friends,

This Monday marked the sixth anniversary of my mother’s death. I still miss her, of course, and I missed her more than usual this week, but enough time has passed that her absence has ceased to feel like a constant presence. This peace, however, is a relatively recent development. For a long time after her death, I went to bed early but rarely slept, ate next to nothing, read very little. I lived in a world full of mnemonic devices, a forest of symbols where all signs referred back to her memory and my loss.

I found it easy to forgive my “good-enough mother” for the hurt that her imperfect love had caused me. But I found it almost impossible to forgive myself for having resented her—and so I punished myself. I’d fallen ill with a bad case of the disease that Freud called melancholia: a neurosis in which the patient holds onto their grief for a lost love-object far longer than healthier spirits, usually because they feel guilty that their affection for the person they lost coexisted with much uglier feelings. It wasn’t until I sought psychoanalytic treatment that I was able to see that I, too, had been a good-enough son.

And so I find it fitting that the two essays I’d like to share with you today are engagements with Freud. The first piece, “Neoliberalism’s Death Drive,” appeared in the most recent issue of one of my favorite publications, Parapraxis, a journal of psychoanalytic thought published by my sister-comrade Hannah Zeavin. The essay is a romp, a bit, an exercise in trolling—but it’s also an attempt to seriously consider the limitations of Friedrich von Hayek’s theory of the unconscious. To whet your appetite, here’s a bit from the first section of the piece:

Consider, for instance, the source of one of the central metaphors of classical economics:

Lady Macbeth:
What’s to be done?

Macbeth:
Be innocent of the knowledge, dearest chuck,
Till thou applaud the deed.—Come, seeling night,
Scarf up the tender eye of pitiful day
And with thy bloody and invisible hand
Cancel and tear to pieces that great bond
Which keeps me pale.

When it came to finding an image to personify the Market—so much like God or like Fate in its unpredictable power—Adam Smith reached for the text of a tragedy that is concerned above all with the unconscious.

[…]

More than a sunlit square, alive with the din of exchange, the Market turns out to be nocturnal and uncanny: a matter of fantasy and pulsion rather than reason or calculation. Like an unsettling dream, or a vision that might or might not be the product of psychosis, the Invisible Hand tempts us to surrender to desires that lay beyond the pleasure principle—even or especially if doing so would bring about our destruction.

At the manifest level, the Market is for Smith a mechanism that guarantees the social order; at the latent level, his metaphors suggest an engine of aggression and chaos. The Invisible Hand, in brief, is a figuration of the death drive.

The second essay, “Oración del 10 de febrero,” appeared in Spanish in the latest issue of nexos. Like the first piece, it’s very much informed by Freud—but while it pretends to be about Alfonso Reyes, the death of his reactionary father, and the outbreak of the Mexican Revolution, it is also a work of mourning:

Hace diecisiete cinco años murió mi pobre magnífica padre madre. Así iba a abrir mi ensayo: borrando la apertura de otro ensayo, la obra-de-luto de otro hijo-escritor. La fecha lo ameritaba: media década sin Laura, casi la sexta parte de mi vida. Pero el arte de perder, como sabía Elizabeth Bishop, es difícil de aprender. Reconciliarse con una ausencia irremediable es menos una maduración filosófica que una sucesión de cortocircuitos. Nada sorprendente aquí, ¿cómo podría ser de otra forma? Ante una madre que deviene en polvo, en sombra, en nada, una madre que ya no escucha ni responde, devenimos en brutos, en piedras sin su lenguaje. Y entonces nuestra mente, esa yegua espantadiza, al vernos desnudos de los símbolos que amortiguan nuestro paso por el mundo y presas de un dolor sin mediaciones, opta por la fuga. Olvidos convenientes, errores motivados, fantasías, delusiones, autoengaños, metáforas hermosas que transforman a nuestras vidas en ríos y al morir en la mar, incluso la brevísima psicosis que nos convence, en medio del velorio, que su pecho aún se mueve, que todavía respira, que vive o resucita: cualquier embuste es útil, incluso adictivo, si nos permite negar, o al menos olvidar por un momento, el hecho atroz de la muerte de la madre […]

Conversando con una amiga, uno conjuga en presente a quien desde hace años habita en el pasado. Uno sueña con ella y, tras despertar, tarda media mañana en recordar que ya no existe, sólo para luego echarse a llorar como el día en que dejó de existir. Uno se olvida de poner la ofrenda —cosa imperdonable en el hijo-escritor de una mujer para quien el Día de Muertos era el centro espiritual de la vida— y corre al mercado poco antes del anochecer del 2 de noviembre, sólo para enterarse de que ya no queda cempasúchil. Uno visita el panteón para dejar flores al pie de su nicho y, luego de parpadear para cerciorarse de que no está alucinando, confirma que la lápida reza “Laura Pérez Velázquez” en lugar de “Laura Pérez Vázquez”. Uno se dispone a escribir un ensayo conmemorando el primer lustro desde el fin del mundo, un ensayo que también sería sobre la muerte del padre de Alfonso Reyes, y descubre que este invierno no se cumplen 111, sino 112 años del mes que Reyes bautizó como “febrero de Caín y de metralla”, lo que quiere decir que este 10 de febrero marcará no el quinto, sino el sexto aniversario de la agonía apoteosis asunción muerte de mi madre.

This brings me to the ~personal news~ I promised at the top: the nexos essay I just shared with you is my last piece as a member of the magazine’s staff. After six wonderful years at the legendary house on Avenida Mazatlán, I decided to resign my position as senior editor to focus on my own literature. I don’t know what’s next for me in professional terms, but for now I’m excited to get to work on a new novel, The Third Empire. Here’s the very beginning of a very early draft:

If you can believe it, and I’m not saying you should, the first time I saw someone throw the three-finger salute that, for a brief moment, derailed the life of the Mexican nation, and also, for a much longer period, my own life, was not at the hipster halls of the Covadonga in Mexico City, nor at the haunted chapel at the Legion of Christ’s Universidad Anáhuac, but at the University of Chicago, of all godforsaken places, and more precisely at the graduate student lair known as the Woodlawn Tap, or alternatively Jimmy’s, because every college-town bar in the United States, as everyone knows, is required by the laws of God and man to carry an unofficial name that makes reference to a long-dead owner or barkeep, which in retrospect strikes me as appropiate, because there was, in fact, something faux-traditional about the gesture, something incongruous and energetic, mock-heroic and begrudgingly admirable, as well as sad and a little pathetic, adjectives that can describe, with equal justice, doctoral programs in the humanities and the notion of a Third Mexican Empire, which was, at least in those early stages, very much a graduate-school fantasy, at once self-aware and self-aggrandizing, ironic as in dumb on purpose and dumb as in unintentionally ironic, invested on epatering les bourgeois to the point of image-board edgelordism, the product of reading too many books too quickly, of an unmet drive to revolt against a world that changed too fast and yet too little, but which was also, as I would find out later and far too late, a dead-serious plan to set the world to rights by reversing the tide of the centuries.

“¡La tercera es la vencida!” declaimed the Empire’s self-appointed Court Philosopher, Harmonie, a tall and pale Hegel scholar with long and straight black hair parted in the middle to reveal a striking, angular—and, dare I say, quite beautiful—face, as she lifted her right hand over her head and held up her thumb, index, and middle finger, like some Serbian countess fallen on hard times might count up to three, in an atrocious Spanish accent that betrayed participation in the kind of accelerated course designed to ferry people who already knew the important tongues—Greek, Latin, Sanskrit, German—through the lax standards of a ‘Mediterranean language’ requirement.

“What does that mean?” asked the woman from one or another island nation in the South Seas, whose name I couldn’t remember, but whom I’d taken to calling Thorn, on account of the terrifying choker, reminiscent of Christ’s crown at the Crucifixion, that she wore around her neck.

“Third time’s the charm,” replied the Dante scholar, whose name I also couldn’t remember, and who was, besides myself and Poet Mariana, the only Mexican in attendance, and who had earned my eternal esteem by being the lone soul at the table kind or idle or deranged enough to have already read my first novel, which had just come out to disappointingly little fanfare, and which I was at present supposed to be peddling from door to door, as if it were some fine Afghan rug, in the course of an emotionally exhausting promotional tour of the five American cities where I’d misspent my youth.

“So the second was Maximiliano, yes?” asked my friend Laura, who was also Harmonie’s girlfriend, and who at the time was writing a dissertation on the protofascist roots of alternative medicine, which had been tended to by an assortment of 19th-century nudists, frutivores, mineral water enthusiasts, eugenicists, phrenologists, and Jew-haters, and who therefore knew a thing or two about the Second Mexican Empire. “But who was the first?”

“Agustín de Iturbide,” I said.

“An unsung hero!” said Harmonie. “Had the Mexican people been wiser, we’d remember him in place of that stirrer-up of strife, the wretched Bolivar.”

“Are you Iturbide’s descendant?” said Poet Mariana, turning to face me with her charming, half-mocking grin, the one she’d used with me ever since we’d stopped sleeping together half a decade ago, and who had since gone through the Iowa program and was now sleepwalking through a PhD in poetics at Illinois State. “I bet you are, aren’t you?”

I looked at her, trying to decide if I should smile with complicity or contrition. We’d gotten coffee before the book event. I told her that I’d broken up with Alejandra. She replied that she had a new boyfriend.

“Your Honor, I plead the Fifth.”

“Sebas is basically a nobleman,” Poet Mariana went on, turning to the table. “If Bernardo Reyes hadn’t been killed in 1913, he’d be living large in his family’s hacienda in Durango.”

“A creole Jünker!” said the Dante scholar, whom I then and there decided to start calling Dante, because asking him to remind me of his name would have been unbearably embarrassing, seeing that he’d read all five hundred pages of my ill-advised experiment in neobaroque autofiction.

“He’d look so handsome with a Mensur scar across his face, don’t you think?” said Harmonie as she reached across the table to touch my cheek. “It’d compensate for the baby fat. Alas, he went to Yale instead of Heidelberg.”

“Happens to the best of us,” said Laura.

“No matter,” Harmonie went on. “He’ll have plenty of chances to prove his valor. The Third Empire will need its cavalrymen. You can ride, I assume?”

That’s all for now, friends. Stay hydrated and start psychoanalysis. Otherwise, you might end up acting out your insecurities in public, and in the process reveal that you’ve spent several years thinking about that time when a writer you’ve never met tweeted something mildly mean about your book.

Your Most Foreign Correspondent,

Nicolás

Dear friends,

Late last year, I received a bewildering invitation: the editors of Studies in the Novel, an academic journal published by Johns Hopkins University Press, wanted me to contribute an essay for a special issue of their publication, which would be dedicated to dispelling “received truths about the novel that we recognize, from a more specialized perspective, to be untrue.”

I wrote back saying that I was honored, but also that I was in no way a specialist. I’d gotten an MFA—a “fake degree,” as Elif Batuman might say—rather than a doctorate; the last academic paper I’d written was my undergraduate thesis. The editors replied that my lack of credentials was itself a credential: the journal was making an effort to combat the insular nature of scholarly criticism by including writers from outside the academy, and since they’d enjoyed my essays in The Nation and n+1, they’d decided to reach out. Was there a truism about the novel that had always bothered me? Here was an opportunity to set the record straight.

I shouldn’t have taken the assignment: I was rushing through the speak-now-or-be-silent-forever round of corrections on the final proofs of my first novel, América del Norte (a-side) and running on Ritalin fumes to edit the Nexos special issue on the 30th anniversary of the North American Free Trade Agreement (b-side). But I’ve never been able to resist the temptation to pick a nerd-fight, so I wrote to the editors and said I’d love to write a piece about so-called autofiction.

The term had become a dirty word, if not a straight-up insult. At the Iowa program as in New York and Mexico City, I heard writers groan when someone used it to describe their work, even or especially when their novels were obviously autobiographical. But I had no such scruples. I was about to publish a 500-page tome about a character who resembled me so much that the dust-jacket copy describing the plot was all but identical to the author bio on the opposite flap. To pretend that I’d written something other than autofiction would have been ridiculous.

But there’s a catch, and ignoring it betrays an interpretative error so widespread that it passes for common sense, but in truth evinces such a dearth of readerly sophistication as to induce despair for the future of literature. I mean, of course, that my book isn’t a memoir masquerading as a novel, but a novel masquerading as a memoir. To think the resemblance between narrator and author-function means that the book is about me is to miss the point by several miles.1 I wasn’t interested in confession or in eliciting sympathy, much less in writing a salacious tell-all. I was interested in the undecidability of the First Person, or rather of language as a whole; in the ironic instability that always lurks behind our words—even when we write in a literal (nonfictional) rather than a figurative (fictional) register—but comes to the fore most clearly when fiction and nonfiction become impossible to tell apart.

Such was the “truism about the novel” that Your Correspondent tried to dispel in his Very First Academic Article, which you can read in full below. I generally only include excerpts of the pieces I share here, and instead direct you to the website of the publication—but since it would be unconscionable to passive-aggressively goad you into subscribing to an academic journal, I’ve made an exception. If you prefer podcasts to scholarship by dilettantes, you can check out this episode of my genius-friends Jo Livingstone and Charlotte Shane’s podcast, Reading Writers, where I deliver a version of my argument.

That’s all for now, friends. I hope you enjoy the holidays and that 2025 brings you, if not joy, then at least ordinary unhappiness. I remain, as always, Your Most Foreign Correspondent,

NMMP

SECONDHAND BORGES: BEN LERNER, ROBERTO BOLAÑO, AND AUTOFICTION AS DEFACEMENT

For John D’Agata

I

Nobody seems to agree on what it is, or rather was, let alone on whether it amounted to an exciting development in the history of literature or evidence of cultural decline.

It was a brave attempt to raise the stakes of the novel, to renounce irony as the refuge of the timid and gather the courage to say what one meant; or it was a cowardly retreat into the private, Werther reheated in the microwave.

It was a cynical commodification of bourgeois subjectivity, the aesthetic detritus of the neoliberal gentrification of the mind; or it was an effort to test the consequences of the proposition that the personal is political, to transform experience into exemplar and testify on the age one had been blessed to witness.

It was a thought experiment in moral philosophy, the dialogues of Rousseau and Diderot reborn as a conversation with friends; or it was a bundle of bad feelings repackaged as righteousness, the final stage of the Closing of the American Mind.

It was the temper tantrum of a generation raised on therapy, the result of treating trauma as a credential; or else the cri-de-coeur of a cohort condemned to mental illness by the precarity of the Great Recession, the violence of racism and misogyny, and the terrors of climate change.

It was High Art or lowbrow entertainment, or High Art as lowbrow entertainment, or lowbrow entertainment as High Art; the contemporary expression of timeless concerns or a passing fashion; proof that so-called Millennials were capable of genius or evidence that, actually, we couldn’t write for shit.

Whatever it was (or perhaps still is), there’s no denying that “autofiction” was (or is) one of the central categories with which people who think about literature sought to understand the Anglophone novel of the early twenty-first century. That, at least, is what it seems to have been for my peers: the literary lingua franca of our generation, a model for how to write not just about but also in the Spirit of the Times.

But for me, and perhaps only for me, autofiction was also something stranger: a bridge between North and Latin America. Over the course of my decade-long tour of duty as one of the United States’s ten million aspiring writers, I embraced autobiographical literature, mostly because it was legible to my American friends, who were obsessed with the question of “identity.” Along the way, however, I discovered that Anglophone autofiction’s insistence that the border between literature and life is not a wall but a membrane echoed a tradition closer to my hometown of Mexico City: the metaliterary lineage of Miguel de Cervantes, who beget Jorge Luis Borges, who beget Roberto Bolaño.

Hence the central thesis of this essay: the claim that Bolaño also beget Ben Lerner. The proposition is debatable in philological terms, but I’m convinced that approaching these novels as if they had been written in Spanish allows for more interesting readings than the litany of commonplaces to which I just subjected you. If we resist the historicist temptation to trace the genealogy of such authors as Sally Rooney and Teju Cole to 1970s France, and instead search for their origins in a tradition enamored of metaphysics rather than confession, we might finally get rid of the received idea that clouds our interpretations of many contemporary novels: the notion that autofiction is a way of writing about the self that calls itself fiction so the author may be sincere, when in truth it is a way of reading certain works of literature that meditate on the fictional nature of the self, feigning sincerity so the author may disappear into the ironic ambiguity at the heart of language.

II

I promise we’ll soon get to Bolaño and Borges. Before we go on, though, we need to address the question that triggered this essay: What is (or was) autofiction? The difficulty in answering suggests that there’s a logically-anterior question at hand: Why is it so hard to say what we mean when we use that word?

Part of the problem stems from the fact that the term operates in the liminal space between three discourses-about-literature that are often at odds but exist on a continuum: literary scholarship (theory, philology), cultural journalism (book reviews, interviews with authors), and book-marketing (blurbs, ad-copy). Each of these discourses occurs in a specific institutional context (the university, the magazine, the sales office) and serves a different function (to educate readers, to evaluate writers, to sell books). What complicates the picture is that, in one way or another, literary scholars, cultural journalists, and book-marketers are all in the business of deciding which books are “good literature.” The stage is set for the sort of misunderstandings that arise when speakers of languages that belong to the same family but have long diverged become convinced that they can follow what the other is saying.

A literary scholar, for instance, might use “autofiction” in a historical sense: as a term coined in 1977 by the French novelist-critic Serge Doubrovsky, an inheritor of Duras and a contemporary of Ernaux, who wanted to differentiate his own First Person writing (concerned with the quotidian, unafraid of the banal, shameless to the point of exhibitionism, often smutty, mostly boring) from both the class-coded limitations of the traditional memoir (“that privilege reserved for the important people of this world at the end of their lives,” as Doubrovsky called it on the dust jacket of the first edition of his novel Fils) and the legalistic strictures that the theorist Philippe Lejeune christened as “the autobiographical contract” (the agreement between the writer and the reader of a memoir in which the former swears to tell the truth about the “history of [their] personality” [14]). Autofiction would then be the name of a form (a set of rules for how to make art) grounded on a novelistic (as opposed to nonfictional) epistemology and justified on political grounds: First Person writing by normal people who reserved the right to do violence to the so-called facts of their lives.2

By contrast, a cultural journalist commissioned to write an essay-review on three recent books (say: Tao Lin’s Taipei, Edward St. Aubyn’s Patrick Melrose, and Emmanuel Carrère’s Yoga) might use “autofiction” as a taxonomical term that links together a set of novels that are in truth quite different but share protagonists who resemble their authors. Autofiction then becomes the name of a genre defined not by its formal procedures but by its content: There’s such a thing as “the novel of ideas,” so surely there must be something like “the novel of the self.” The result is the diametrical opposite of the scholar’s analytic narrowing: a synthetic expansion so capacious that all of a sudden Proust (and therefore Knausgaard) becomes a writer of autofiction; even though the Proustian (and therefore the Knausgaardian) project is not so much a meditation on the self-that-writes as an attempt to convey the texture of consciousness in writing.

Finally, a publicist tasked with convincing some thousand members of the American reading public that they should pre-order an exophonic Mexican writer’s debut (a rather long and not especially accessible essay-novel about “whiteness, power, immigration, and the history of Mexican literature”) might reach for the term “autofiction” to facilitate a comparison between the book in question (which, you guessed it, is my first novel)3 and Teju Cole’s Open City. That the Mexican writer’s debut doesn’t really resemble Cole’s frankly superior revival of the tropes of nineteenth-century flânerie doesn’t matter. The point of promotional copy is not to interpret literature but to sell it, and comparing an aggressively foreign novel to a more legible work accomplishes that goal. This strategy, however, has an unintended consequence: according to this logic, autofiction is not a form or a genre but a category of consumer preference: If you liked this book, you might also like this other book.

Hence the incompatible judgments about autofiction I satirized at the start of this essay: more often than not, differences of opinion about these novels are the result of using the same word to mean different things. Like all evocative terms, “autofiction” is a shapeshifter: its denotations mutate depending on whether it appears in Publishers Weekly, the New York Review of Books, or Studies in the Novel.

III

But the slipperiness of autofiction has a deeper set of roots that have little to do with semantics. Autofiction proves difficult to define, let alone evaluate, because autobiographical writing lays bare the fundamental ambiguity of language. At the very moment when a work of fiction begins to refer to its writer, the tacit pact that grounds literature as a form of communication breaks down. If you can’t tell whether the protagonist is in fact the author—whether I’ve made my stand-in more or less lovable than I actually am, whether I’m confessing sincerely or lying through my teeth—how could you ever be sure that I mean what I say?

Soon we are forced to conclude that there’s no outside-the-text, no “real world” against which one could compare the novel’s truth-claims and thus verify their accuracy (or, to put it in terms more germane to our discussion: their sincerity). The text does not represent the world, much less the self; every book is an iteration of the self-referential labyrinth that Jorge Luis Borges (or rather “Jorge Luis Borges”) discovered when he tried to find the source of a quotation lifted from a bad translation of the Encyclopedia Britannica: “Mirrors and copulation are abominable because they increase the number of men.” So with autobiographical literature: a language-mirror that conjures a double of the author. Even if it insists on its value as “testimony,” it cannot be anything else than a work of deception.

These are unfashionable ideas, I know. What can I tell you? The seminars I attended as an undergraduate made a deep impression on me. Here, for instance, is my teachers’ teacher, the unforgivable Paul de Man:

The distinction between fiction and autobiography is not an either/or polarity but that it is undecidable....The interest of autobiography is not that it reveals reliable self-knowledge—it does not—but that it demonstrates in a striking way the impossibility of closure and totalization. (920)

The key to a reading of autofiction that doesn’t fall prey to semantic confusion or culture-war banality is to remember, with de Man, that autobiography “is not a genre or a mode, but a figure of reading” (921). The joke is that the origins of this notion are not to be found in New Haven or on the Rue d’Ulm, but in the National Library of Buenos Aires. It’s not a coincidence that both Derrida and Foucault (the former in La pharmacie de Platon, the latter in Les mots et les choses) cite Borges as a source of inspiration, nor that one of de Man’s first critical essays in English is a rave review of an early translation of Borges. To read autofiction in a post-structuralist key, then, amounts to reading it as Hispanophone literature.4

IV

But why, the Idle Reader asks, did this fool decide to bring up his own book? My only defense is that the insights I hope to share here didn’t originate in my work as an occasional critic, but in my practice as a novelist. Asking me to write a critical essay about autofiction is a bit like asking a chimpanzee to produce a paper on primatology: a fun exercise, but one bound to be messy, and perhaps a little embarrassing.

The good news is that the awkwardness I’ve induced in the Idle Reader— or at least in myself—illustrates an important point: the affect of autofiction is embarrassment. The devices of these novels are best understood as attempts to negotiate the feelings of shame and discomfort that arise when we read or write about the life of the novelist. Consider the Hispanophone text that I believe catalyzed contemporary English-language autofiction: The Savage Detectives. The poets who populate Bolaño’s masterpiece are ridiculous, at once self-aggrandizing and unselfaware—cringe, as the kids say these days. Bolaño reaches for irony and metaliterature because to write about his youth in a more earnest tone would be unbearably embarrassing.

What’s funny is that the Chilean’s runaway popularity in the English-speaking world was often predicated on misreadings of his autobiographical novel, which many in the United States took not as a conversation with Borges, but as a Spanish-language homage to the Beat Generation. Some American readers I’ve met seem to think that the visceral realists are heroes: the best minds of their generation, destroyed by madness. They’re only half-wrong: Bolaño’s characters are indeed heroic—but only in a Cervantine way. Ulises Lima and Arturo Belano are neither Romantic geniuses ostracized by a philistine society nor modern holymen who found sainthood in the margins, but close relatives of Don Quixote: fools driven mad by books, losers caught in the gap between the life they’ve imagined through reading and the one they’ve been offered by the world. The paradox at the core of The Savage Detectives is that it presents a detailed historical record of people who accomplished nothing worthy of memory. The beauty of the gesture resides in the absurdity of granting a place in literary history to people who left their great books unwritten.

The Beat Generation’s interest in self-mythologizing, by contrast, strikes me as infinitely more sincere and naive than the self-parodic spirit that animates Bolaño. Where On the Road is concerned with producing a “realistic” representation of the “real” lives of writers, Detectives is interested in the ways in which writing and reading give form to life, or rather deform it. The origins of Bolaño’s approach to autobiography are not to be found in benzedrine-fueled hagiographies of hitch-hiking mystics, but in Borges’s postmodern refashioning of the metafictional procedures of the Spanish Baroque: an era that cultivated irony with a devotion that remains unmatched.

Hence the interpretative potential of the Hispanophone reading of Anglophone autofiction that I’m proposing. A novelistic tradition that traces its heritage to Ficciones is infinitely more self-reflexive than one that traces its lineage to The Dharma Bums: the latter, like My Struggle, is a naive attempt to represent reality in language; the former, a meditation on the impossibility of accessing “reality” through language. As evidence, consider the difference in the ways in which Kerouac and Bolaño treat their characters’ habits of reading and writing. Beyond a few stray mentions of Nietzsche and occasional references to Buddhist texts, the Beats rarely talk about books. They don’t seem to read very much—they are too busy living. By contrast, the visceral realists spend most of their time arguing about the writers they admire or despise. Like Borges, they are readers first and writers second: writers who know that all writing is reading, that literature is never about life and always about literature.5

V

The same, I’d like to suggest, is true of the best Anglophone autofiction, which pretends to be concerned with the biography of the writer, but secretly knows that the graphia always precedes and outlasts the bio. While I don’t know for a fact whether the writers of what one might call The Anglophone Autofictional Canon had a transformative encounter with Borges, there’s at least one central figure of American autofiction who was from the start received as a disciple of Bolaño: Ben Lerner, a novelist whose profound influence on my own work causes me a great deal of anxiety. Consider two passages from rave reviews of his first novel, Leaving the Atocha Station (Coffee House Press, 2011), that his publisher repurposed as promotional burbs:

Perhaps it’s because there’s so much skepticism surrounding the novel-by-poet that, when it’s successful, it’s such a cause for celebration. Some prime examples of monumental novels by poets and about poets (but not just for poets) are Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago [and] Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives.... (Akhtiorskaya)

If Bolaño was yesterday’s drug of choice—deluding us with youth, intoxicating us with a sense of literature’s wilder, life-altering capacities—Lerner could be, should be, tomorrow’s homegrown equivalent.... (Cohen)

Once you see it, you can’t unsee it: Lerner’s first narrative effort is a work of metaliterature about a poet-loser from the Americas who moves to Spain in hopes of becoming a writer, has a number of hilarious misadventures in which he comes off as a fool, thinks about his place in a genealogy of poets, and behaves sub-optimally around the women who care about him—only to have his life interrupted by History. Replace John Ashbery with Manuel Maples Arce, the Fulbright Committee with Octavio Paz, the terrorist attacks that shook Madrid in 2005 with the traumas of 1968 in Mexico and 1973 in Chile, and Atocha reveals itself as a translation of Detectives. The fascinating corollary is that it’s also a translation of Borges, which in turn means that the relationship between Adam Gordon (the protagonist) and Ben Lerner (the author) poses more interesting problems than the banal question that framed much of the early reception of Atocha: Is he really that insufferable?

VI

The Hispanophone approach to autofiction, then, consists in taking it not as “sincere” writing about life, nor as a genre or a form or a marketing niche, but as a way of reading attuned to the phantasmagoric nature of the First Person, which some (but not all) autobiographical novels demand from their readers. This is why I believe that the most autofictional passages of Atocha are those where Adam Gordon confronts the fact that he isn’t living a nonfictional life, but rather crafting the fiction of a life:

When I had dried myself off and dressed, I lit the spliff, poured the rest of the espresso and, if I’d finished a translation in the park, typed it up on my laptop and emailed it to Cyrus. Although I had internet access in my apartment, I claimed in my emails to be writing from an internet café and that my time was very limited. I tried my best not to respond to most of the emails I received, as though this would create the impression I was offline, busy accumulating experience... (18–19)

The self-deprecating humor becomes metaphysical vertigo when we realize that, even if Adam Gordon didn’t spend much of his time in Spain online (which is to say reading: in Atocha the virtual is a figuration of literature), he still wouldn’t be living but “accumulating experience.” The economic metaphor is telling: experience is a commodity that one can hoard. A kind of capital. A raw material—but for what? For literature, of course. De Man again:

We assume that life produces autobiography as an act produces its consequences, but can we not suggest, with equal justice, that the autobiographical project may itself produce and determine the life, and that whatever the writer does is in fact governed by the technical demands of self-portraiture and thus determined, in all its aspects, by the resources of his medium? (920)

Lerner’s first novel, like The Savage Detectives and Don Quixote, is an account of living-for-the-sake-of-literature and in the process discovering that there is no such thing as “life” but only literature; that the First Person is a grammatical fiction. In this sense, Atocha couldn’t be more different from My Struggle. Knausgaard’s text derives a great deal of its power from the naivete with which it insists that its extraordinarily contrived narration is the unmediated record of a life that takes place outside the text. This is why I believe that, if the term “autofiction” means anything, it applies to Lerner but not to Knausgaard: the former invites interpretations that keep an eye out for the impossibility of representing the self; the latter goes out of his way to assert that his novels are totalizing self-portraits.

VII

Which brings me, finally, to Borges. His metaphysical conceits often make us forget that many of his stories, essays, and poems are narrated by a First Person that shares a great deal with its author: the profession of librarian, the Argentine nationality, a melancholic disposition, an affection for Schopenhauer, blindness, and the name “Jorge Luis Borges”—but also, and perhaps most importantly, an agonizing consciousness of his own tendency to sentimentality.

Consider, for example, “The Aleph,” a canonical story about a miraculous object that allows an insufferable poet (a brutal satire of Neruda) to see the world in a grain of sand, but which is also, as Roberto González Echevarría has pointed out, a rather sappy account of the embarrassing attachment that “Jorge Luis Borges” still feels for a woman he loved desperately, and who died without giving him the time of day. That her name is Beatriz is meant to distract us: Borges (or “Borges”) would have us believe he’s writing about Dante, but can we ever be sure that “Borges” isn’t writing about Borges and his feelings? Better still: could it be that “Borges’s” lovesickness is itself a product of Borges’s reading of Dante, because there’s no self outside of literature, no life beyond the text, no experience unmediated by reading?

The mirrors and encyclopedias are just that: smoke and mirrors, red herrings. Borges’s philosophical labyrinths serve a similar purpose as Lerner’s disquisitions on poetics: to keep us from realizing that the First Person is cringe. The proof that Borges, too, was interested in inviting autofictional readings resides in the palpable contradiction between the two impulses that animated his work, and which he was wise enough to heighten: the drive to confession and the pulsion to conceal, the desire for a coherent self that could be put into words and the terrible certainty that there was no self beyond the words. Nowhere is this tension more evident than in a prose poem (or is it a short story—or, God forbid, a personal essay?) that appeared in one of his late books: “Borges and I.” Here are a few fragments in James E. Irby’s translation:

The other one, the one called Borges, is the one things happen to...I live, let myself go on living, so that Borges may contrive his literature, and this literature justifies me....Little by little, I am giving over everything to him, though I am quite aware of his perverse custom of falsifying and magnifying things....I shall remain in Borges, not in myself (if it is true that I am someone), but I recognize myself less in his books than in many others...I do not know which of us has written this page. (246–47)

There you have it—at long last!—a definition: Autofiction is a way of reading that insists on the impossibility of knowing who has written this page. The challenge for both readers and writers of fiction about the First Person is to hold onto Borges’s ironic question: Who is speaking here? And so I’d like to conclude by once again making it all about me (if it is true that I am someone) and issuing an embarrassing request. Were you to come across my novel, Idle Reader, grant me the indulgence of approaching it as autofiction: with the understanding that the First Person never represents anyone—least of all the writer.

Nicolás Medina Mora. Independent scholar.

WORKS CITED

Akhtiorskaya, Yelena. “Writing Poetically About Spain and Desire.” The Jewish Daily Forward. https://forward.com. Sept. 28, 2011. Accessed Jan. 2024.

Borges, Jorge Luis. “Borges and I.” Labyrinths. Trans. James E. Irby. New York: New Directions, 1962. 246–47

Cohen, Joshua. “Avant-Slackerism at its Best.” The Faster Times. Oct. 13, 2011. Wayback Machine, Internet Archive. https://web.archive.org. Accessed Jan. 2024.

Doubrovsky, Serge. Fils. Paris: Galilée, 1977.

Lejeune, Philippe. Le Pacte autobiographique. Paris: Seuil, 1975.

Lerner, Ben. Leaving the Atocha Station. Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 2011. 18–19.

Man, Paul de. “Autobiography as Defacement.” Modern Language Notes 94.5 Comparative Literature (1979): 920.

Friends, guess what? My nexos comrades and I just published the latest installment of the project that has consumed a substantial part of our waking hours for the past year and a half: a six-episode narrative podcast on the history of the North American Free Trade Agreement. I’m afraid that La invención de América del Norte (do you sense a theme here?) is in Spanish, but I know that a not-inconsiderable portion of you are familiar with our sonorous Castilian, so I figured I should share it with you.

This podcast is part of one of the most ambitious projects in the history of nexos. Over the course of the last year and a half, we conducted more than 30 hours of interviews with the Mexican protagonists of the drama, from former president Carlos Salinas de Gortari to the leaders of the left-wing opposition that mounted a heroic effort to stop this catastrophe on its tracks.

Since then, we’ve been exploring different ways to tell the story that emerges from the the negative space between their contradictory accounts of the origins of the treaty that shaped our continent—and also, as those of you who are idle or patient or deranged enough to have read my novel, my own life. Some of you may be familiar with the special issue of the magazine we published this January, on the 30th anniversary of the agreement. Now, you can hear the voices of our interlocutors—and you’ll soon be able to read the full transcriptions of the interviews in a free ebook we plan to publish later this month.

I’m so proud of the team that made this happen: my genius-colleagues at nexos, María Guillén, Julio González, Vita Dadoo Lomelí, and especially Valeria Villalobos, the narrator and mastermind of this podcast. I’m also thrilled to have worked with some of the best audio journalists in Mexico: our friends at Genuina Media, Iñigo Alegría and Sergio Audelo, as well as my brother Ricardo López Cordero (who also happens to be my co-host in the extracurricular podcast on the intellectual history of Mexico that we make in our spare time, Archivo General). The illustrations for each of the episodes are the work of the great Víctor Solís, who is responsible for nexos’s trademark cartoons.

I would love for their work to reach the largest possible audience. If you find time to listen and you like what you hear (or even if you don’t: we’re in the running for a bunch of prizes, and I’m told such things matter), could you please give it a 5 star rating, click the “follow” button, and share it with your networks? Ghastly self-promotion, I know! But then again—and to our great misfortune—nexos’s NAFTA Project has recently become more relevant than ever. The reelection of that North American Caligula has left many of us wondering about the future of the agreement. Our take, which you can hear at the end of the last episode, is that at this point it’s easier to imagine the end of the democracy than the end of free trade. But who knows?

That’s all for now, friends. To those of you who live in the US: please take care of yourselves ? You have all my solidarity. The enemy has never ceased to be victorious, but I hold on to the optimism of the will. Here’s hoping we can imagine a new North America. One where people, and not just capital, can cross borders at will. One where we can vote in the same elections and ensure the likes of Trump can never again take power. Not a North American Union. Not a North American Alliance. A North American Commune.

I remain, as always, Your Most Foreign Correspondent,

NMM

Friends, please forgive me for spamming your inboxes so soon after my last letter. It’s just that, while anxiously refreshing the New York Times homepage, I also did a last pass on my own English translation of an essay that I published in the special issue of Nexos that we published this January to commemorate the 30th anniversary of NAFTA. The piece will appear in a bilingual ebook that we’ll distribute free of charge, but reading it again, I realized that it will never again be as relevant as it is today. And so here it is, in all its un-copy-edited glory:

The Last North Americans

By Nicolás Medina Mora

To call it a poster would be excessive: it was a sad sheet of white paper that had obviously emerged from the printer that some Young Urban Professional residing in the Very Young and Very Urban and Very Professional Colonia Roma, a rapidly gentrifying neighborhood in central Mexico City, had purchased during the terrible months when the home became an office. I promise this inference isn’t prejudice or caricature but the product of the most elementary journalistic deduction. It was obvious that this was the work of an amateur, someone who’d never wallpapered the hallways of the Faculty of Political Sciences with Maoist slogans, much less sweated like a Swede in a sauna while putting up placards with the face of some politician with dubious faculties and no knowledge of science. No, the experience in the arts of street propaganda of the person responsible for the sheet of paper extended, at most, to handing out photocopies of the adorable face of a lost puppy. Instead of a thick layer of glue applied as if it were varnish, or in the worst case a smattering of the most humble paste, the message had been affixed to a light pole with four pathetic staples.   

That’s the extent of the details that remained in my memory. I don't remember the font, for example, though I'm almost certain it was banal (Times New Roman) or else hilarious (Comic Sans). In truth, my reporter’s honor demands I confess that I don't even remember the exact content of the message. It was written in English, that’s for sure, and more specifically in the good English that in Mexico betrays those who endured a private education: idiomatic, almost perfect, but plagued by diminutive errors. 

What follows is non-fiction only in the sense of Montaigne, who declared (or could have declared) that his subject was not only what came to pass, but also what might have happened. Let's say (let’s pretend) that the sheet of paper I found stapled to a light post in La Roma said:

GO HOME YOU FUCKING GRINGO!!!

EVERYONE HATES YOU HERE!!!

YOUR [sic] RUINING CDMX FOR THE REST OF US!!!

DIGITAL NOMADS ARE A PLAGUE!!!

That, at least, was the spirit of the affair: an attempt at linguistic aggression that reached for violence but only managed ridicule. I’m certain that at least one gringo must have seen it and felt like the victim of a hate crime—but that gringo, too, would be ridiculous. This was not activism or protest, much less concerning evidence of a growing proto-fascist xenophobia among the English-speaking residents of one of Mexico’s most expensive zip codes. No, this was a rageful message in the co-op group chat where one of the owners complained that, ever since a neighbor had put his unit on AirBnB, the building had become the stage of scandalous orgies attended by coked-up blondes; a Yelp review cursing the servers at Contramar for daring to offer a menu in English to a proud citizen of the Mexican republic; a Twitter thread declaring, with the sanctimonious vehemence of a storefront preacher, that the gringos who move to Mexico City because it’s “cooler” and “cheaper” should live burdened by an almost metaphysical guilt.

The sheet of paper cursing the gringos of La Roma, in brief, was little more than a temper tantrum. But it was also something sadder, and deeper, and more revealing: the lament of a jilted lover. I would know. I’m the asshole who wrote the thread about metaphysical guilt.

It's been a year or two since I came across the anti-gringo poster, but recently I’ve found myself thinking about it almost every day. The reason seems obvious to me, though I suspect it might not to anyone else: In the course of preparing this special issue of nexos, my colleagues María Guillén, Valeria Villalobos, Julio González and I spoke at length with many of the Mexican architects of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). 

These conversations forced me to question many received ideas that I’d accepted uncritically. For instance: the leftist commonplace which holds that the so-called “neoliberal technocrats” who ruled Mexico at the time of the negotiation were at best pragmatists without ideas and at worst cynics without values. The truth is more complicated and unsettling: the Mexican negotiators of NAFTA were something rarer, more beautiful, and far more dangerous: They were a congregation of utopians, a band of apostles, a vanguard party. The discovery that most surprised me, however, was the that the authors of the region's economic integration still believed in what we might call “the idea of América del Norte,” a beautiful concept that I’ve left untranslated for reasons that will soon become clear, and that in my eyes remains as far from being realized as the full communism of Lenin’s dreams. 

But what is—or better: what was—this idea? I spent seven years writing a novel (in English, of course) titled América del Norte (in Spanish, of course), and for that very reason I don’t have the slightest clue of how to answer that question. Still, I suppose that, if someone held a gun to my head and demanded I define that nebulous cloud of contradictory associations in 280 characters or less,  I would probably say something like this:

The idea of América del Norte is that Mexico and the United States have left behind the enmity that had divided them ever since the War of 1847, availing themselves of the equalizing power of treaties to become partners and friends.

The notion that economic integration would lead to transnational friendship has determined the course of my life to an extent that never ceases to baffle me. Like most members of the Mexican elite born circa1990, I was raised to inherit the New America that would take the place of the long-outdated Nuestra América (the name that the 19th Cuban revolutionary José Martí conferred to the sister-republics of the part of the hemisphere that was colonized by the Spaniards). It’s not a coincidence that the average thirty-something graduate of any private high school from the wealthy districts of Mexico City is incapable of parsing the syntax of Sor Juana’s baroque poems (or, for that matter, posting a sign) but always, without exception, speaks flawless English. 

I’m afraid that my case is especially bad. At age 18, dissatisfied with my bilingual education—and desperate to put many miles between my tormented teenage soul and my father’s political career—I moved to the United States to go to college at Yale. My choice of school was anything but coincidental: along with Cambridge and Chicago (but not, interestingly, Los Angeles or New York), New Haven is one of the epicenters where the idea of ​​América del Norte was born. Let's put it this way: one of the first classmates I met when I arrived at the university is an immensely likable guy named Sebastián Serra. His father, Jaime Serra, one of the chief negotiators of NAFTA, also studied at Yale, as did an economics professor who was known among my undergraduate classmates less for his former job—he was president of Mexico from 1994 to 2000—than for his rumored tendency to assign eight hundred pages of reading each week to those brave enough to enroll in his seminar on globalization: Ernesto Zedillo.

Why, then, was I so surprised to discover that the architects of NAFTA believed in an optimistic vision of the future born in the corridors of America's elite universities? Wasn’t it natural that a generation who went through the same positive experience as me—few places closer to paradise for a Mexican kid with an aristocratic last name and intellectual inclinations than Harvard Yard or the Old Campus—trusted the country that had welcomed them so warmly? Yes indeed. Except that the operative word of my last rhetorical question isn’t natural, but generation. Unlike our elders, I and other elite Mexicans who arrived in New Haven or Hyde Park during NAFTA’s second decade witnessed the rise of Donald Trump and his clique of dimestore Eichmans. After the 2016 presidential election, even the most privileged Mexicans living in the United States were forced to confront a truth that our class position had allowed us to ignore: a substantial portion of the people of our adopted country saw us not as partners or friends, but as despicable and dangerous inferiors. 

It was a bitter lesson: the country we admired—whose language we had studied before mastering our own, whose culture we knew better than ours, whose people we loved as much or more than ourselves—hated us. As the narrator of my novel says to himself at the beginning of his descent into the underworld: “The problem at hand was not one of facts but of translation. América del Norte did not mean the same thing as North America.” 

Hence, I’m willing to bet, the pathetic fury of the temper tantrum that some fool stapled to that light post. I have no way of knowing whether its author ever lived in the United States, but it wouldn't surprise me. I would know: there are few things more humiliating than returning to Mexico after living in America for ten years—and not by choice, but because a gaggle of white supremacists denied one a green card—only to discover that the hometown one did everything to leave behind is now full of gringos. Such is the tragedy of América del Norte: thirty years after NAFTA, Mexicans and Americans have yet to become equals. How many of us wouldn’t love to move to Brooklyn just for the sake of it, without having to perform highwire acts to secure a visa or a well-paying job, because the immigration authorities will never bother us and the salary we earn remotely is worth twenty times more in our adopted city than back home? In truth the affair is even sadder: How many of us wouldn’t love to move to Mexico City like the gringos do, not as a confrontation with demons but as an adventure, a long vacation?

Still, the fact remains that anti-American displays, such as the sheet of white paper or my thread about metaphysical guilt, often draw negative responses from other Mexicans. These reactions, I think, can be largely explained by the commonly held notion, accurate in many cases, that the people who complain most loudly about the gringos who’ve settled in some of the most expensive neighborhoods of Mexico City are privileged people. What right do we Young Urban Professionals have to denounce the gentrifying practices of our new American neighbors? Even if we assume that the newcomers are far more numerous than what the official statistics suggest, blaming the housing crisis of a city with half as many inhabitants as the entire state of Califonira on a handful of foreigners is evidence of class blindness. Conflating the vast capital with a handful of central districts is only possible if one, like your correspondent, only rides the subway in the course of a journalistic investigation into its decades-long decline.  

It’s undeniable that the ancient Romans, displaced by the barbarians of the North, in turn displace less fortunate residents of Mexico City. But if we leave aside the spillover effects of rising rents in La Roma, the seed of political lucidity that hides at the core of my peers complaints becomes easier to see: Even those Mexicans who benefit from unfair advantages have fewer rights than a group of Americans who, in the context of their country, often enjoy fewer privileges than we do in ours (and who, it must be said, often remain conveniently unaware that the average wage in Mexico City is 3,000 dollars per year, which means that a salary that would be precarious in New York puts them in the wealthiest 1% of their adopted home). The white sheet of paper stapled to the light pole makes a crucial point, even if the form in which it expresses it is undeniably embarrassing: It doesn't matter how rich or how white you are or whether you went to Yale or Harvard, at the moment of truth, gringos are still gringos and Mexicans remain Mexican.

I’m not asking for anyone's solidarity. My grievances and those of my peers are so unimportant that they don’t deserve more public attention than I’ve already given them in this essay. What I want to suggest, rather, is that these complaints are a superficial symptom of a deeper reality: América del Norte as a community of equals never existed except in the minds of the Mexican architects of NAFTA. The gringos who move to La Roma are not usually Trumpists—many of them have told me that their decision to leave the United States had a lot to do with the election of that orange buffoon—but their presence in Mexico City offers incontrovertible proof that the asymmetry which the treaty was meant to resolve is still very much alive. If América del Norte indeed exists, my peers and I are second-class citizens of the new transnational homeland. It goes without saying that the vast majority of Mexicans living in the United States—or in Mexico for that matter—are noncitizen aliens of that imaginary realm.

All the same, there’s something undeniably unpleasant—or, to quote one of the Twitter users who replied to my unfortunate thread, something “in bad taste”—about the tantrums of the Young Urban Professionals. If resentment, so close to hatred, is always hateful, the resentment of those whom the majority resents is doubly so. Consider, for example, an unfortunate incident shortly after my repatriation. Two of my old college classmates, people who I had very much liked back in New Haven, were passing through Mexico City and stopped by my place to say hello. Less than an hour after they showed up, I was already asking them if they could tell me the year when the Mexican American War began. They couldn’t—could you, Idle Reader?—but the date I spat at them after they failed the stupid exam to which I’d subjected them wasn't the right one either.

I’m telling you all of this in hopes of explaining the sympathy I feel for the author of such an unsympathetic document as the sheet of paper stapled to that light pole. Few things embarrass me more than the way I treated countless American friends (some of them now ex-friends) in the months of depression (which is to say: the months-long temper tantrum) that followed my return to Mexico City. None of them—especially one of them, who will know, if she ever reads these lines, that this essay is a letter of apology—deserved to become the scapegoat for the pain that the collapse of the North American utopia inflicted in my heart. Were my American friends ignorant of all things related to Mexico? Much more than the majority of Mexicans in relation to the United States. Were they unaware of the unfair advantages offered to them by their blue passports? Almost as much as I and my peers are unaware of the unfair advantages of our surnames. Were they responsible for US imperialism? Yes, but they weren’t guilty of its causes or consequences. 

Contrary to what I wrote in that unfortunate Twitter thread, the fact that one has benefited from the crimes that others committed in one's name means that one should be accountable, not that one deserves punishment. My friends owe me answers, as all Americans owe them to all Mexicans. But to pretend that a person one claims to love should bear the blame for everything that has happened since 1847 is, besides neurotic, ridiculous. The gringos of La Roma may be naive, unaware of their privilege, unwitting traders profiting from the foreign exchange, even bad neighbors. But they are not—in any way—a plague. 

This last point is a recent conclusion for me. During the first years after my return to Mexico, I couldn't come across a gringo in the street without trembling with rage. How dared they set foot in my city while, at that very moment, their government was tearing children from the arms of their parents and interning them in concentration camps? Things got to the point that an artist friend and I began to sketch a performance in which we would walk around La Roma dressed in a blue uniform that would have the word HIELO embroidered on the back. Each time we saw a gringo, we’d approach them and shout, in artificially accented English: Show me your papers! If the gringo in question had with him a child-gringo, the script would switch to a parody of the inscrutable lingo of Mexican human rights activists: Is that person in a situation of infancy your person in a situation of infancy? Prove it with papers or we'll take them away from this situation of vulnerability!

The performance never happened, though not for the reason that I would have liked—what kind of psychopath thinks it's okay to subject a father or mother to such a cruel joke?—but rather because my friend and I realized that impersonating a police officer is a felony that the Mexican criminal code punishes with years in prison. In any case, and to my shame, the little piece of street theater that never happened is a perfect emblem of my feelings at the time: the anger, grief, and jealousy of an ex-boyfriend who really needs to go to therapy, because his jilted love risks mutating into hatred.

Hence the surprise I felt a few months ago, when The Nation, a magazine to which I sometimes contribute, asked me to participate in a panel on Mexican politics attended by a group of subscribers who’d come to town on one of the guided tours with which the publication offsets the loss of advertisement revenue. While answering a question from the audience about what Trump's second candidacy looked like from Mexico, I found myself saying something that two years earlier would never have left my lips: I have faith in the American people.

In the days that followed, as my psychoanalyst can attest, I turned the phrase over and over in my head, trying to decide whether it was a lie motivated by a colonial subject’s desire to feel accepted by his betters or a lapse of involuntary sincerity. I wound up leaning towards the second option: I do, in fact, have faith that the American people will not elect Trump a second time. Faith, of course, is not synonymous with certainty: one can only have faith in the face of uncertainty. I wouldn't be surprised if the orange clown returns to the Oval Office—trust me, I would know—but now that the bruises I developed in the course of my quarrel with the most imaginary of imagined communities are beginning to heal, I can finally say that my jilted lover’s resentment has faded.

I will never trust her again—fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me—but today, thirty years after her birth and thirty-three after mine, I’ve finally managed to forgive my ex-girlfriend, América del Norte: that idea in equal parts beautiful and false, that unrealizable utopia, that collection of counterfactuals, that ouroboros of contradictions. I can only hope that she, too, will one day find reason to forgive me. Knowing that our love has left to never return gives me peace; may the certainty that our separation is irreparable also bring her closure. For at this point there’s no denying that I and the rest of my lovesick generation—the privileged Mexicans born at the same time as NAFTA, including the imaginary author of that sheet of paper—were at the same time the first and the last North Americans.

Mexico City, January 1, 2024.

Friends, I come to you in a hurry: I have been traveling in the US—a reading at Prairie Lights in Iowa City, then my dear little sister’s wedding—and as a result I’m behind on everything, including your Foreign Correspondence.

Today I’d like to share with you a little piece that two Certified Geniuses, the Thrice-Noble Rachel Ossip and the Incredibly-Terrifying Simone Liu, invited me to write for Triple Canopy. It’s part of a roundup in which the editors asked a bunch of people—all of them Very Cool: I’m in intimidatingly good company—to write a short essay about their “favorite saboteur” (the image at the top of this post, by the inimitable Sam Keogh, is part of a series that illustrates the roundup).

As some of you may know, I have a hard time being brief—but sticking to a five-hundred-word-limit was a fun exercise precisely for that reason. Besides, I got to tell one of the wildest stories anyone has ever told me, and on which I’d been sitting for years, because I never found a place for it. It’s about Joaquín Villalobos, the military commander of the Frente Farabundo Martín para la Liberación Nacional, the Marxist-Leninist guerrilla that fought to free the people of El Salvador from the murderous oligarchs who ran the country in the 1980s. Since the piece is so short, it would be silly to share an excerpt via email. But you can find it here (sans paywall, bien sûr!).

That’s all for now, dear friends. Good luck with the US election and all that. May the American people spare themselves—and, you know, the rest of the world—from an acceleration of their country’s descent into fascism. I know Harris is an enabler of genocide and a cop and Generally Bad, and I of course respect anyone who follows the calling of their conscience and refuses to vote for her. But, for what it’s worth, I think it’s clear that Trump would be worse—particularly for people who need visas, abortions, hormones, etc. And, you know, for Mexicans and Salvadorians and probably Palestinians. Here’s hoping we get neoliberal reactionaries rather than white nationalists?

I remain, as always, Your Most Foreign Correspondent,

N

Hello! Happy Inauguration Day to those who keep the faith. Here’s hoping that Claudia Sheinbaum, who is about to become the first woman to serve as president of the United Mexican States, governs like my friends who support her assure me she secretly intends to, rather than like she has said she will.

In the event the holiday has left you in the mood to contemplate the proposition that men and women make their own history, but not under conditions of their choosing, the New York Times just published my review of the English translation of Yuri Herrera’s new novel, Season of the Swamp. Here’s a bit to whet your appetite:

Among the tragic heroes and comic villains who fill the pantheon of Mexican history, few command more solemn respect than Benito Juárez, who in the mid-19th century rose from destitute origins to become his country’s first Indigenous president. His place in the national imagination is not unlike the one a Black Abraham Lincoln might have occupied in America: a secular saint who overcame racist barriers to bring justice and reform to the motherland. His canonization may well be warranted, but as it happens with most victims of hagiography, it’s hard to think of Juárez without yawning.

And so it is a testament to Yuri Herrera’s virtuosic talents that his new novel, “Season of the Swamp,” manages to breathe new life into a character who had long become a wax figure. Instead of subjecting us to yet another retelling of Juárez’s more exalted moments, Herrera has chosen to focus on an unglamorous interlude in the future president’s biography: the 18 months of exile that Juárez spent in antebellum New Orleans.

Herrera is one of the truly great novelists working in Spanish these days, and his new book doesn’t disappoint. I think it might inaugurate a new period in his career, one more concerned with the appropriation of historical documents and with the phenomenology of perception than with narrative or plot. It’s also blessedly short: you can read it in a day off, such as the one all Mexicans are enjoying today.

I leave you with the last few lines of a poem by WH Auden, which you should imagine are about Mexico rather than about the US:

But the stars burn on overhead,
Unconscious of final ends,
As I walk home to bed,
Asking what judgment waits
My person, all my friends,
And these United States.

Sorry to spam your inboxes so soon after last time, but I’d like to share with you a new essay of mine that has just been published in The Nation: a review of Creation Lake, Rachel Kushner’s extraordinary new novel. It’s her best to date and—you heard it here first!—Pulitzer and / or Booker material.

Here’s a bit from the opening:

In a 1974 essay on the poetry of Luis de Góngora, the high priest of the Spanish Baroque, the Cuban novelist Severo Sarduy coined the concept of la metáfora al cuadrado—metaphor squared, or metaphor to the second power. Writing in a period of imperial decline, Sarduy explained, Góngora turned metaphors on their head, hoping to make them new and find vitality in an era of attenuated exhaustion. Where a lesser poet might write that “water is crystal,” Góngora would instead write that “crystal is water.” Looking for his materials in the “eroded, already gnawed-on terrain” of a flagging Spanish empire, he had to refashion the conventional and clichéd into the strange and unfamiliar, even the nonsensical. The result, Sarduy noted, was that Góngora unleashed a “geometric multiplication of metaphor”: His rhetorical figures presumed that the reader was familiar with the tropes of a worn-out poetic canon that he at once rejected and embraced. Along the way, according to Sarduy, Góngora took an already perverted language and made it even more perverted. Figuration no longer needed a referent; at the center of his metaphors there was nothing but other metaphors.

Rachel Kushner’s extraordinary new novel, Creation Lake, is a worthy heir to this tradition of linguistic deviousness. Set in present-day France, the book delivers, among other things, a parody of contemporary French fiction and theory, a meditation on the promise and peril of radical politics, an elegy for the soon-to-be-lost way of life of small European farmers, reflections on both modernity and prehistory, accounts of medieval peasant revolts, climate anxiety, white wine, sex, violence, betrayal, and an ars poetica whose central metaphor figures the novelist as a kind of secret agent: a liar who seduces the reader by pretending to be someone else.

There’s nothing baroque about Kushner’s prose, which is full of tension and clarity and as far removed as imaginable from Góngora’s impenetrable metaphors. Yet many of her gestures conjure a doubling effect not unlike the one that Sarduy described. Her new book is a spy novel raised to the second power. It’s not just that Creation Lake is a fiction about a secret agent; it’s that the secrets this agent carries with her are often themselves fictions—she is as much of a novelist as her creator. The result is that the referents that would ground the novel in the real world disappear swiftly into a hall of mirrors, until nothing but the power and profundity of language remains. If Plato wanted us to step outside the cave of deceitful rhetoric and into the sunlight of transparent truth, Kushner makes an argument for stepping further into the cavern, where the dancing flames of a torch can afford us a different kind of revelation.

This is why I love writing for The Nation’s back-of-the-book: the editors let me get away with murder and frame a review of new American fiction in the terms of a cult classic of the Latin American Neobaroque. Check out the new Kushner, of course, but if you read Spanish—an English translation is apparently forthcoming—do take a look at the essays of Severo Sarduy, whom García Márquez once famously called “the best writer in the Spanish language.”

(An aside on GGM’s compliment: it would seem that every Latin American writer worth his salt must make such a pronouncement in precisely the same terms. Borges said it about Alfonso Reyes, Bolaño about Pedro Lemebel, etc.)

A queer novelist who began his career as an apprentice of José “Big Neobaroque Daddy” Lezama Lima—who, incidentally or not, was also queer—Sarduy left Cuba for France when the revolutionary government started rounding out gay people. There he fell into the orbit of Barthes and Lacan and the writers of the journal Tel Quel (Derrida, Kristeva, Foucault).

The result of this unusual combination of influences is a brilliant and deranged body of work: a number of borderline-incomprehensible novels (the only ones available in English, as far as I know, are Cobra, about a drag queen, Tibetan Buddhism, and language; Firefly, about hurricanes, exile, and language; and Beach Birds, about dying, HIV, and language), cryptic poetry (a collection, Footwork, has been translated), and labyrinthine essays on literature and the body that are always weird, frequently funny, often confusing, and invariably brilliant.

That’s all for now! Thank you, as always, for reading. I’ll send a note once the next episode of Archivo General is out—it’s about José Vasconcelos’s autobiography, Ulises Criollo. Do stick around for a discussion of my problematic fave!

Muera el Supremo Gobierno,

Nicolás

I hope you’re doing well and enjoying the end of the summer. This time around, Your Correspondent brings you Hispanophone delicacies straight from the kitchen:

1. A new episode of Archivo General, the podcast I cohost with the great Ricardo López Cordero, in which we discuss the various (and incompatible) conceptions of history at play in my debut novel, América del Norte:

2. My introduction to the facsimile edition of Lecturas clásicas para niños—the anthology of world literature with which my problematic fave, José Vasconcelos, whom some of you met in my novel, wanted to teach the children of Mexico how to read—that Alias, the publishing project of the artist Damián Ortega, put out earlier this year.

That’s all for now! As always, I remain Your Most Foreign Correspondent,

NMMP