This essay examines José Agustín’s novel Se está haciendo tarde (final en laguna) (1973) as a work that gives spatial form to the collapse of the Mexican state’s postwar program of autonomous industrialization. Focusing on the formal use of circularity and repetition, it argues that Agustín’s novel creates patterns that shape the experience of Mexican modernity according to newly found principles of consumer society. The port city of Acapulco is centered as an emblematic site to narrate the limits to the developmental program of the Mexican state. The novel’s simultaneous approximation to Acapulco as a slice of paradise and a raging inferno, although rarely explored in relation to the peripheral logic of Mexico’s capitalist modernization, captures the pressures exerted on the dependent world by the advent of late capitalism.

Revista de Estudios Hispánicos, vol. 59, no. 3, 2025, pp. 477-499. [Published 2 July 2026]