Mexico
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A Son of Mexico’s Elite Bids for Literary Stardom April 24, 2024
“There are different categories of fancy Mexican,” says one character in Nicolás Medina Mora’s debut novel, América del Norte.These include fresas (“harmless, except for their accents, which are known to cause aneurysms,”) pipopes, mirreyes, progres ...
Notes From a Dead Horse February 06, 2024
A man stands alone in a barren landscape. He wears a poncho, a chain of beads, and a sombrero that darkens his face. Having lingered on him for a few moments, the camera pans right, as if it’s more interested in the sand and rocks. But the man follow...
Forbidden Fruit October 20, 2023
Phone service was down—a fuse had blown in the cell tower during a recent storm—and even though my arrival had been cleared with the government of Cherán in advance, the armed guard manning the highway checkpoint, decked out in full fatigues, the wro...
On Mexican Baroque July 06, 2023
Each time I return to Mexico I find myself marveling at how many elements of daily life there could, in some way, be described as Baroque: our sunsets, our cuisine, our pollution, our corruption. Century after century, the country has exhibited a gre...
Cortés in Mexico May 30, 2023
For centuries, the fall of Tenochtitlan, the majestic, lake-bound capital of the Aztecs or Mexica, has engaged historians and storytellers. To the admiring, conquest was neat, romantic and at once novel and familiar. Hernán Cortés’s order to ground h...
Stranded in the Pacific May 17, 2023
For centuries, Spanish galleons plied their way between Manila and Acapulco, the one trading route between Spain’s colonies in Asia and the Americas. Their twice-yearly Pacific crossings brought silver west from Mexico and silks and spices east from ...
The Inventor of Magical Realism May 08, 2023
Neither Gabriel García Márquez nor Mario Vargas Llosa had yet been born when the Guatemalan Miguel Ángel Asturias began to write his first novel, El Señor Presidente, in December 1922. He labored on it for a decade while living in self-imposed exile ...
"This Is Not Miami" by Fernanda Melchor April 03, 2023
Set in and around the Mexican city of Veracruz, This Is Not Miami delivers a series of devastating stories—spiraling from real events—that bleed together reportage and the author’s rich and rigorous imagination.These narrative nonfiction pieces probe...
Conservatism’s Mexican Roots March 27, 2023
Reflecting on the Revolution in France in his classic 1790 treatise, the Anglo-Irish politician and philosopher Edmund Burke wrote that “whenever our neighbor’s house is on fire, it cannot be amiss for the engines to play a little on our own.” More t...
Stuck in the Labyrinth March 13, 2023
Crises in Mexico have a way of taking on their own unique expression. Indeed, many in Mexico have come to believe that, rather than marking a sharp turning point, crisis is the permanent state of affairs.There is a long tradition in Mexican literatur...
The Oldest Surviving Book in the Americas October 20, 2022
When the Spanish invaded the Yucatán Peninsula in the 16th century, they were met with a system of beliefs, practices, art and language so sophisticated and complex that they neither comprehended nor trusted it. Desperate to root out an Indigenous cu...
Ways of Ending October 07, 2022
Early departures, surprise comebacks, protracted witherings, late holdings-on: all different ways of ending things. These are Geoff Dyer’s subjects. At sixty-three, the “Slacker Laureate” is too old to still be zipping between beaches in Mexico and f...
