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In this essay I consider two books by the Mexican writer Cristina Rivera Garza – Había mucha neblina o humo o no sé qué (2016) [There Was a Lot of Fog or Smoke or I Don’t Know What] and Autobiografía del algodón (2020) [Autobiography of Cotton] which conjugate journeys to sites in Mexico where agricultural and industrial labour played a critical role in the country’s post-revolutionary reconstruction. I illustrate how these works not only spotlight the long-term effects of dispossession, transnational migration, and “slow violence” but also articulate an epistemology of what I call “queer errantry”. Drawing on ideas from Edouard Glissant, Anna Arabindan-Kesson, Gloria Anzaldúa, and Sara Ahmed, I argue that, in the context of significant environmental and gender violence in Mexico and its “visceraless” state, for Rivera Garza travel and pedestrianism function as acts of relation, forms of reckoning with the rapid acceleration of capitalist modernity. As a way of reading and representing the world, “queer errantry”, I suggest, comprises a decolonial feminist praxis of orientation and remembrance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper rescues the forgotten Mexican poet Concha Urquiza (1910-1945) from three keys: the peripheral place that women occupied in the dominant literary circles during the interwar period; the use of religiosity as dissidence in the face of the crisis of the historical avant-gardes and the advent of the postmodern paradigm; and the construction of women's genealogies as a feminist strategy. This analysis reinterprets, through these keys, the profound meaning of her poetry as a modern appropriation of the mystical tradition. Also, two recoveries of Urquiza as mater: Cristina Rivera Garza's feminist reading; and Roberto Bolaño's affirmation of the modern as resistance, as shown in Los detectives salvajes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

El mal de la taiga (2012) de Cristina Rivera Garza tiene como escenario a una lejana e inmensa región de bosques de coníferas que alberga a seres perturbados por un mal cuyo origen fluctúa entre lo mental y lo espiritual. En la vastedad de la taiga, una detective, acompañada por un traductor, va en busca de una mujer cuyo marido se resiste a aceptar un segundo fracaso matrimonial. Es durante esta búsqueda que la detective descubre situaciones que englobadas conforman un gran mal: El mal de la taiga. Sin embargo, Rivera Garza traslada a la taiga un tema socioambiental que atañe a Latinoamérica. La trata de personas vinculada a la explotación de recursos naturales emerge de manera sutil en la en la novela. A través de la presencia de leñadores en los prostíbulos, Rivera Garza sugiere una interrelación entre la trata de personas y los depredadores de los bosques. Durante su búsqueda, la misión de la detective adquiere rasgos periodísticos, ya que de forma involuntaria atestigua hechos que pertenecen al ámbito público de la taiga. Este artículo analiza los nexos entre la explotación de recursos naturales y la explotación de personas en El mal de la taiga y hace un paralelo con la realidad latinoamericana en el ámbito de las actividades extractivas-legales e ilegales-y agro-productivas, en torno a las cuales se producen atropellos en contra del medio ambiente-depredación-y tropelías en contra de personas: intimidación, trabajo forzado, explotación sexual de menores y adultos, secuestros y asesinatos. El análisis pone énfasis en la prostitución de adultos y la explotación sexual de menores, y basado en artículos, informes, reportajes y testimonios concluye que El mal de la taiga es una versión novelada de un mal que, en realidad, aqueja a Latinoamérica. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Cristina Rivera Garza's El mal de la taiga (2012) the search for bodies that are absent yet residually present serves as a self-realizing allegory for the limits of language to express reality and human experience. This essay explores these themes through the lens of the aporia, defined by Jacques Derrida as undecidable propositions whose very conditions of possibility are the same conditions that lead to their impossibility. Through an analysis of the various aporetic propositions in the novel that reflect the undecidable nature of language, violence, and communal experience, this article contends that the metaphor of the taiga as a geographic space becomes substituted with that of the taiga as labyrinth where the unresolved tension between articulation and disarticulation invites readers to appropriate the narrated experience in an act of mutual creation and contestation. Paradoxically, the uncertain nature of narrating the corporeal experience enables communal communication and creation through which subjectivities are made absent only to be affirmed and created anew. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I suggest a reflection upon two books that explore a reconstitution and an enlargement of the human and non-human living. Cristina Rivera Garza's El mal de la taiga (2012) and Había mucha neblina o humo o no sé qué (2016) offer imaginative coopenings that depose the individual subject as a paradigm, and the community as a social group linked to a territory. Those narratives track possible relations between the human and the living, territory and culture, geographic materials and collectivities; but they also display formal creative elements as well as reading and writing processes that are committed with this imaginative opening. The agreement between literature experience and vital confluence calls a regime of sensibilities that combines not only the past and present times but also an experience of virtual times together with a sensitive and cognitive contemporary condition. The enhancement of formal, material and scriptural registers in the production of Rivera Garza inspires an essential hypothesis; that is to say, modulating and renewing the writing is the sine qua non condition to explore new modes of conception of the un(human) subject and the community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cristina Rivera Garza suggests in Los muertos indóciles that a reading of documentary narrative in consideration of the community/communality binnomiate should work as a way of posing new questions regarding these literary texts. This article reviews both concepts, respectively proposed by Jean-Luc Nancy in dialogue with Maurice Blanchot, and by Floriberto Díaz, in order to propose a concordant reading of Juan Pérez Jolote by Ricardo Pozas and delve into Garza's theoretical proposal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article centres on the representation of mental illness in Cristina Rivera Garza'sNadie me verá llorar(1999). The discussion is informed by a simultaneous reading of the author's historiographic texts, in particular ofLa Castañeda. Narrativas dolientes desde el Manicomio General. México 1910–1930(2010). The article explores the novel's engagement with the theories of hygiene and degeneration; its interrogation of photography as a medium of classification in the asylum and other disciplinary institutions; and the way in which the medical case histories and the narratives produced by the asylum's doctors and inmates are evoked in the novel's textuality. It is argued here that, through its consideration of the discourses, technologies, institutions, narratives, and subjects that configure the tapestry of mental illness in early twentieth-century Mexico, Rivera Garza's novel puts forward a meditation on the ethical and political implications of “seeing the insane” against the background of a critical period in Mexican history. Departing from the discourses and traditions of representation that objectify the mentally ill, the novel's poetics – centred on that which is undecidable, fragmentary, and marginal – give visibility to absence, loss, and suffering, challenging the idea of progress concomitant with that of Mexican modernity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers corpse photography in novels by Bolaño(1996) and Rivera Garza(1999) and argues, following the ideas of Elizabeth Bronfen, that it serves male characters as a technique for the disavowal of two enigmas that permanently threaten the male subject: death and femininity. Parallels are drawn with necropornographic precedents in the novela negra and with contemporary Post-Boom novels by Diamela Eltit and Tomás Eloy Martínez. Artistic practice in the novels is related to the photographic theories of Susan Sontag and Roland Barthes, affirming a profound association between the photographic medium and death, as well as to the Surrealist doll photographs of Hans Bellmer and the work of contemporary corpse photographers Joel-Peter Witkin and Andrés Serrano. Corpse photography is considered as an exemplary manifestation of major trends in twentieth-century art and mass-media culture, as described by theorists such as Néstor García Canclini (‘morbid spectacularity’), Alain Badiou (‘passion for the real’), Hal Foster (‘return of the real’) and Paul Virilio (‘pitiless art’). Corpse photographs are shown to set up a dynamic of approximation and distancing termed ‘t(h)an(a)talization’. The article concludes by arguing both photographic and literary representation, converging at the textual site of the corpse photograph, fail incessantly in their aspiration to apprehend the real. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

La crítica ha subrayado cómo la tesis doctoral de Cristina Rivera Garza, “The Masters of the Streets: Bodies, Power and Modernity in Mexico, 1867-1930" (1995), sirve de prototexto para el contenido de su premiada novela Nadie me verá llorar (1999). Sin embargo, hasta ahora no se ha explorado cómo “The Masters of the Streets" y Nadie me verá llorar comparten una metodología procedente de la aproximación a la historiografía propuesta por el filósofo alemán Walter Benjamin en Las tesis sobre la filosofía de la historia (1940). Los dos textos de Rivera Garza, partiendo de Las tesis de Benjamin, recuperan del vertedero histórico las voces anteriormente definidas como detrito. De esta manera, la escritora se convierte en lo que el filósofo alemán llamaría una “trapera histórica." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Interweaving history and fi ction, Cristina Rivera Garza's novel, Nadie me verá llorar (1999), traces the story of the asylum La Castañeda during the fi rst decades of the twentieth century with the purpose of critically examining a new emerging discipline system in the process of construction of a "good citizen." Yet, through the representation of a "demented" woman who does not conform to the nation's modernization project, this novel also offers different angles to read the Mexican Revolution. Performative madness, as a strategy of resistance of so-called pathological subjects to domestication, can be interpreted as a revolutionary expression that has been silenced in the hegemonic history of the revolution. Thus, rather than it just being a site of confinement and control, the asylum becomes a battlefield of constant negotiation of power and language. Breaking with conventional ideas of history, Rivera Garza demonstrates that the defiance of disciplined civic life constitutes another form of revolution within the Mexican Revolution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Among the allegories that have flooded Mexican contemporary literature, the end of the world occupies a growing territory in its realm of signs. From the crash literature--whose first novelistic cycle was composed of five apocalyptic novels-- up to the punk worlds of Bernardo Fernández, the end of the world has become a cultural signifier that shapes the collapse of two concepts that drew the cultural and political coordinates of post revolutionary Mexico: Nation and Modernity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In an overview of the so-called nueva narrativa del norte, this essay focuses on the conflictive relationship between regional literature and economic and cultural globalization in the works of David Toscana, Cristina-Rivera Garza, Eduardo Antonio Parra, Élmer Mendoza, and Luis Humberto Crosthwaite—arguably the most innovative voices in Mexican contemporary literature. Their success has turned the Mexican North into a "hot commodity" in today's literary market and, thus, generated an important critical reception of their works in literary and cultural studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Non-consumable literature by Cristina Rivera Garza appears in her novel La cresta de Ilión (2002), which takes inspiration from the similarly non-consumable literature of short story writer Amparo Dávila. The term "non-consumable" intends to describe a text that resists readers' memory and mastery; the text denies assimilation or easy "digestion." Within the critical exploration of literature resistant to reading, the present article contemplates the discourse regarding the power of language that Rivera Garza constructs through her predecessor's texts. At the end of the analysis, the theme of official history as a fixed and easily digested literature surfaces through use of Juan Escutia in the novel as extant only through other texts. In this way, Rivera Garza demonstrates that official literature prefers to speak from a dead center. As a result, the literary margins where Rivera Garza and Dávila operate connote texts that are more alive, though perhaps more forgettable, among the Mexican literary landscape. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]