Pavel Andrade

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…

This essay advances a reading of Daniel Sada’s Porque parece mentira la verdad nunca se sabe (1999) as a novel that registers the capacity of literary form to think through the intertwined questions of futurity, possibility, and (dis)orientation. I argue that the novel’s emphases on discontinuity, often praised as resisting the influence of fixation and unification, simultaneously open the door…

This essay surveys Mexican literary and cultural production to model a literary cartography of Acapulco. I examine cultural materials that register the patterns of Acapulco’s peripherality at different scales, ranging from the intimate to the global, and across periods, from the heyday of Mexican developmentalism to the so-called neoliberal era. Focusing on the cultural figuration and representation of Acapulco, the…

This essay reflects on how literature and architecture confronted the question of autonomy in post-revolutionary Mexico, that is, how literature and architecture modeled for themselves, in theory and practice, their own independence from society. The post-revolutionary decades witnessed remarkable transformations linked to a variety of modern processes, which inevitably led Mexican artists and intellectuals to reflect on the social character of…

In this essay, I argue that Carlos Fuentes’ La muerte de Artemio Cruz (1962) delineates a theory of Mexico’s long transition to capitalism. I demonstrate that Fuentes’ novel makes sense of the world as it continually separates the external from the internal, the realm of the social from the realm of the individual, and popular from bourgeois interests. While literary…

In this essay I study the supermarket in Diamela Eltit’s Mano de obra as a site of class struggle. Despite readings that see in the novel a representation of post-work society, several scholars have noted that Mano de obra can be productively read as a novel that explores the centrality of labour in present-day capitalism. In this article I suggest…