Mexican literature

Mexican literature includes the poems, songs, legends, and mythology from the pre-Columbian era of Mexico as well as the works of modern authors. Ancient writings were created by the indigenous peoples of southern North America, including the Aztecs and Maya. Colonial-era works often included a mix of European and indigenous ideas and languages. Post-colonial authors have addressed the chaos of the Mexican Revolution, which continues to color the nation’s literary tradition into the present day. Twentieth- and twenty-first-century authors such as Carlos Fuentes, Martín Luis Guzmán, Valeria Luiselli, Octavio Paz, Juan Rulfo, and Jaime Sabines have been influenced by the recent political history of Mexico. 

Background

The earliest known society of Mexico lived along the Gulf Coast near modern-day Veracruz. The Olmecs settled this region and occupied it from about 1200 BCE to 600 BCE. Later, settlements of Zapotec people lived in southern Mexico. The Teotihuacán people built the largest pre-Columbian city in the Americas, also named Teotihuacán, about 100 BCE near what is modern Mexico City. This empire survived into the seventh century CE. 

The Mayas are regarded as the most advanced civilization in pre-Columbian America. Their civilization was at its peak from about 250 to 900 CE. The Mayas are noted for their calendar, but they also developed a writing system. The civilization disappeared abruptly in the early tenth century. 

The Toltec people arrived in central Mexico about the tenth century. They built the city of Tula, which had a population of about 30,000 to 40,000. Many Toltec motifs have been found at Mayan sites, which leads researchers to believe that some Toltec peoples migrated to those locations and settled there. The Toltecs and Mixtecs of Oaxaca used glyphs and created stone inscriptions and painted books. 

The last major pre-Columbian civilization of Mexico was the Aztec empire. It grew in the central valley about 1427 through a partnership with Toltecs and Mayas. Together, they conquered smaller peoples and created an empire that stretched from the Gulf Coast to the Pacific Ocean. The empire numbered about 5 million people at its zenith. 

The Aztecs benefited from the knowledge of the Toltecs and Mayas. Aztec wise men created folded painted books on paper made from bark of the wild fig tree or treated deerskin. These books were used to educate young people in schools around the empire and as a way to record and save their knowledge. The painted books contained historical accounts and myths as well as some religious information, including hymns and poems. The students were expected to memorize the hymns, poems, and other information in the books. 

The Aztecs were the first people to interact with Europeans. When Spanish explorer Hernán Cortés arrived in 1519, King Moctezuma II invited him to his capital of Tenochtitlán. As he traveled to the city, Cortés formed alliances with those he encountered, and in 1521, he and his followers conquered the Aztecs. 

Cortés colonized the area—which he called New Spain, or Nueva España—and enslaved most of the indigenous population. Catholic missionaries began arriving in 1523 and converted many of the Aztecs to Christianity. Spain controlled much of the former Aztec empire by 1574. Disease brought by the conquistadores killed an estimated 24 million indigenous people by 1605. 

Spanish-born colonists, known as peninsulares, were in constant conflict with Mexican-born Spaniards, called criollos. The peninsulares held political power, leading many of the wealthy criollos to demand equal power. Another power struggle began during the eighteenth century. King Carlos III of Spain felt the Catholic Church had too much power in Nueva España, so he expelled the Jesuits. Spain in turn felt its power in the New World diminish during the early nineteenth century when France’s Napoleon Bonaparte occupied Spain. 

Mexico’s people were once again subjected to turmoil when Vicente Guerrero and Agustín de Itúrbide led a rebellion against Spain in the early nineteenth century. They succeeded in gaining Mexico’s independence in 1821 and drafted a constitution. Their collaboration ended the following year when Itúrbide declared himself emperor of Mexico. Antonio López de Santa Anna overthrew him in 1823. Santa Anna then wrote a new constitution for the federal Mexican republic, which comprised nineteen states and four territories. He served as president from 1823 to 1836. After his defeat in the Mexican-American war, he went into exile. Mexico was occupied by the French in the mid-nineteenth century. Porfírio Díaz served as president from 1876 to 1909, and although he brought many improvements to the country, he was also a ruthless dictator whose policies benefited the powerful at the expense of the poor. In 1910, the people rose up and demanded a share of the wealth and influence. The Mexican Revolution lasted a decade. It was not until the 1930s that the poor began to benefit, when president Lázaro Cárdenas initiated a return to the old system of communally shared tracts of farmland. Through the twentieth century, Mexico experienced rapid growth of infrastructure and industrialization. 

Overview

Pre-Columbian literature of Mexico includes the painted books of various cultures. These volumes, or codices, are primarily pictorial, though some contain ideograms and a partially phonetic form of inscription that was used to convey the names of people and places. Colonial-era codices include pictograms as well as Spanish, Latin, and classical Aztec writing in the Latin alphabet. However, few pre-Columbian codices survived the Spanish conquest. 

The Codex Borbonicus was written by Aztec priests at about the time of the arrival of the Spaniards. It includes a divinatory calendar, the Mesoamerican fifty-two-year solar cycle, and information about many ceremonies and rituals, including many related to the solar cycle. Aztec wise men learned the Latin alphabet from missionaries during the early sixteenth century and used it to write down explanations of historical records and some codices. Surviving manuscripts are known as Anales de Tlatelolco. Some Spanish friars also wrote down oral accounts of history including speeches and information shared by previous generations of elders in an effort to preserve their history. In many cases, existing codices were destroyed by Spanish authorities. 

Many arrivals in New Spain wrote about the new land they were exploring. Chronicles by Álvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca and Bernal Díaz del Castillo provide an outsider’s perspective of what North America was like at the time. Later authors adopted mestizaje, a hybrid of common languages of colonial Mexico addressing European topics. 

Baroque literature became popular in Europe during the seventeenth century. In North America, it became known as New World Baroque. A nun named Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz was one of the best-known writers of New Spain. She authored plays, poetry, and writings for religious services and state festivals. Her most important poem is “Primero Sueño,” or “First Dream.” She is also known for “Hombres Necios,” or “Foolish Men.” 

The political upheaval Mexico experienced through the nineteenth century also interrupted the development of literature. Three major literary trends were Romanticism, Realism-Naturalism, and Modernism. The Mexican Revolution (1910–1920) also heavily influenced Mexican authors for more than a century. For example, Laura Esquivel’s 1993 novel, Like Water for Chocolate, employs magical realism in a tale that begins during the Mexican Revolution. The work, which was later translated for film, explores family traditions, women’s lives and burdens, and the enduring quality of pure love. 

A few notable authors of the twentieth century include Carlos Fuentes, Martín Luis Guzmán, Valeria Luisell, Octavio Paz, Juan Rulfo, and Jaime Sabines. Octavio Paz, who was born in 1914, was a poet and essayist, and the 1990 Nobel Prize in literature winner. His early life was influenced by the Mexican Revolution, in that his father was an assistant to revolution leader Emiliano Zapata. Like many followers of Zapata, his family was forced into exile after the leader was killed. The Paz family lived in Los Angeles, California, for several years before returning to Mexico City. He later studied law, fought in the Spanish Civil War, and became a diplomat. One of his best-known essays, The Labyrinth of Solitude: Life and Thought in Mexico, was first published in 1950. He explores Mexican identity, describing the people as children of a Spanish conqueror father and a neglectful Indian mother in this long essay. Some of the parts of the essay are titled “Mexican Masks” and “From Independence to the Revolution.” 

Carlos Fuentes was born in 1928 in Panama City, Panama, where his father served as a diplomat. The family later lived in Washington, DC, where Fuentes spent many of his school years, and lived in Mexico with his grandparents during summer vacations. He learned Mexican history and folklore from his grandmothers. As his father was posted to various Latin American countries, he became aware of the cultural differences and shared heritage. He studied law and became a diplomat, as his parents wanted, but pursued his literary interests as well. His first novel, The Death of Artemio Cruz (1962), is regarded as a masterpiece. It emerged during a time when Latin American authors were producing imaginative and captivating works of fiction, a period called el boom. The novel explores the power vacuum in Mexico after the revolution and the squabbles among revolutionaries. 

Martín Luis Guzmán was born in 1887 and fought in the Mexican Revolution. He also later lived in exile. His memoir, The Eagle and the Serpent, was published in 1928; it provides a look at the people involved in the revolution and their goals and inspirations. He also wrote about political corruption during the 1920s in The Shadow of the Leader. 

Juan Rulfo, who was born in 1917, is regarded as a pioneer of magical realism, a genre that combines a narrative or realistic style with dream-like or fantasy elements. While he produced only two books, his impact on other authors was significant. His short story collection The Burning Plain (1953) reflects his early childhood, when his family lost its fortune during a rebellion. His stories feature techniques such as flashbacks, shifting points of view, and stream of consciousness, all of which had an impact on the development of literature in the latter twentieth century. His 1955 novel, Pedro Páramo, is set in a hell on earth where past evil deeds haunt the dead. 

Jaime Sabines, a prolific poet born in 1927, was the winner of the 1972 Xavier Villaurrutia Award and the 1983 National Literature Award. His poems document the everyday lives of people in ordinary pursuits and settings. His ten volumes of poetry have been translated into more than a dozen languages. 

Mexican-born writer Valeria Luiselli wrote her first books, the essay collection Sidewalks (2010) and the novels Faces in the Crowd (2011) and The Story of My Teeth (2013), in Spanish. She turned to English for her next work of fiction, 2019’s Lost Children Archive. While writing the novel, the US-based author volunteered as an interpreter for undocumented child migrants at the US-Mexico border. She helped many of the children find pro bono lawyers but was haunted by the children’s stories. She wrote the nonfiction work Tell Me How It Ends, which is partially a memoir of her own experiences getting a green card, as testimony to the young refugees seeking asylum. It was published in 2016 and received the American Book Award. 

Many modern authors are delving into Mexico’s linguistic riches. They are writing in Mayan, Tzotzil, Zapotec, and other pre-Columbian languages. Well-known Zapotec poet Natalia Toledo published The Black Flower and Other Zapotec Poems, which was shortlisted for the 2016 National Translation Award. About 25 million Mexicans identify as indigenous, and more than half of those say that an indigenous language is their primary tongue. Many female writers like Toledo are staking a literary claim through indigenous languages in the field of Mexican literature, which has been dominated by males. 

In the 2020s, Mexican writers such as Yuri Herrera achieved wider acclaim in the United States. Writing from Herrera’s adopted city of New Orleans, his book Season of the Swamp (2023) focused on Benito Juarez, an indigenous Mexican who rose to become a military leader and president of Mexico (1858–1872). Herrera's book was a work of historical fiction as little was known about the time Juarez spent in New Orleans. Herrera interjects his interpretation of Juarez’s experiences in the city as the period was formative in his life and, ultimately, to both Mexico and the United States.

Juarez had previously been the governor of the Mexican state of Oaxaca. Forced into exile by the assumption of power by the dictator Antonio Lopez de Santa Ana, Juarez organized an opposition movement while in the United States. In Herrera's narrative, Juarez witnessed injustices which shaped his future reformist political viewpoints. These include his treatment by law enforcement authorities as a foreigner and immigrant. Herrera's Juarez is also marked as he witnesses the bustling slave trade in the port city. Juarez later returned to Mexico and was part of the movement that ousted Santa Anna and, later, an invading colonialist French army.

A distinctive use of prose and language characterized Herrera's writing style in Season of the Swamp and his other literary works.

Bibliography

Ballew, Dora. “Why These Mexican Writers are Ditching Spanish for Indigenous Languages.” Ozy, 14 Aug. 2017, www.ozy.com/fast-forward/why-these-mexican-writers-are-ditching-spanish-for-indigenous-languages/75743. Accessed 12 Feb. 2020.

Brockes, Emma. “Valeria Luiselli: ‘Children Chase After Life, Even if it Ends Up Killing Them.’” Guardian, 8 Mar. 2019, www.theguardian.com/books/2019/mar/08/valeria-luiselli-interview-lost-children-archive. Accessed 12 Feb. 2020.

Frontjes, Rich. “Silence as Speech: Reading Sor Juana’s Primero Sueño in the Light of her Final Silence.” Political Animal Magazine, 4 May 2016, www.politicalanimalmagazine.com/2016/05/04/sor-juana. Accessed 12 Feb. 2020.

“History of Mexico.” History.com, 21 Aug. 2018, www.history.com/topics/mexico/history-of-mexico. Accessed 12 Feb. 2020.

Horswell, Michael J. “Baroque and Neo-baroque Literary Tradition.” Oxford Bibliographies, 5 May 2017, www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo-9780199766581/obo-9780199766581-0004.xml. Accessed 12 Feb. 2020.

“Jaime Sabines.” Poetry Foundation, 2020, www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/jaime-sabines. Accessed 12 Feb. 2020.

“Octavio Paz.” Poetry Foundation, 2020, www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/octavio-paz. Accessed 12 Feb. 2020.

Prado, Ignacio M. Sánchez, Anna M. Nogar, and José Ramón Ruisánchez Serra, editors. A History of Mexican Literature. Cambridge UP, 2016.

Prado, Ignacio M. Sánchez, editor. Mexican Literature in Theory. Bloomsbury Academic, 2018.

Russell, Benjamin P. "The Mexican Novelist Who Found Himself in New Orleans." New York Times, www.nytimes.com/2024/09/30/books/booksupdate/yuri-herrera-season-of-the-swamp.html. Accessed 30 Sept. 2024.