Search

This article analyses how three Mexican novels, published between 1971 and 1999, respond to the effects of political violence on national identity. It focuses particularly on fictional representations of state-sponsored, politically motivated murder and on how survivors negotiate a social space forever changed by unsolved crimes. The article concludes that an important consequence of political violence is that it undermines the validity of systems of representation that once seemed capable of portraying the national community. Each of the three novels interpreted here adopts a different stance regarding literary language's relationship to its ever-changing sociopolitical contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Traces the development of the concept of nationhood in Mexico. Casa Mata rebellion in February 1823 as the event that brought the onset of the federalist revolution; Nationhood as alien to Mexican masses during the Casa Mata rebellion; Drafting of the Acta Constitutiva in November 1823.