Utopian Dreams, Apocalyptic Nightmares: Globalization in Recent Mexican and Chicano Narrative (review)

Miguel López-Lozano's Utopian Dreams, Apocalyptic Nightmares sheds light on a hitherto relatively unknown area within the territory of the utopian imagination. It is a study of the contributions of four Mexican/U.S. Chicano authors of narrative fiction to the ecocritical current of dystopian writing, which "addresses the effects of industrialization on the environment, proposing alternative worlds in which humankind lives in harmony with nature" (26). It focuses on works published in the last two decades of the twentieth century that for the most part amount to imaginative representations of Mexico City: Carlos Fuentes's Cristóbal Nonato (1987); Alejandro Morales's The Rag Doll Plagues (1992); Carmen Boullosa's Cielos de la Tierra (1997); and two novels by Homero Aridjis, La Leyenda de los Soles (1993) and its sequel, ¿En quién Piensas cuando Haces el Amor? (1996). López-Lozano postulates a genre for these works by suggestively comparing them (albeit in passing) with Zamyatin's We, Huxley's Brave New World, Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, and Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451. The point is more argumentative than analytic: it is not so much that there are specific textual correspondences to be detected as that those earlier works can function as a background by way of (apposite) historical analogy.

López-Lozano's main interest lies in "cautionary tales of ecoapocalypses" and "the excavation of the history of exclusion" (5—the notion that history is indeed rewriting being at the core of his project). This he proceeds to do by providing a context that allows him to interpret his canon of works within the larger dynamics of South American social and political history. The introduction very much focuses on what may be described as the utopian invention of the Americas, taking two dates as symbolic: 1492, the arrival of Columbus, and 1992, the signing of the North American Free Trade Agreement. Going back to the colonial period, López-Lozano examines the utopian projections that were made to bear upon the New World as the earthly paradise, briefly considering how "the discovery of the Americas . . . provided Europe with a locus upon which to project its own preconceived myths and desires" (7). After independence, he points out, "Latin American elites began to conceptualize modernization as a new kind of utopia, one that encapsulates the desire to achieve the levels of productivity, comfort, and consumption associated with the nations and economies of the First World" (5-6). Both conceptualizations of South American identity are perceived to entail the establishment of a sense of domination over the peoples, the territories, and the cultures of the Americas, and both are challenged by the authors López-Lozano has chosen to study as they explore the potential of dystopian science fiction to question prevailing assumptions. Specifically, their work is seen to reflect the obvious ambivalence—in a country that was left behind in the process of modernization—between a striving for progress and the cultural and psychological dangers of life in industrialized society.

López-Lozano describes the process of Mexico's belated industrialization, which took place only decisively after World War II, and traces the story of industrialized capitalism through several political and economic crises, seeing modernization itself as the utopia par excellence of Mexican elites (see 26-40). In such conditions, López-Lozano submits, art emerges "as a viable form of resistance to the rules of the market, since local artists can create awareness of social issues and problems, thereby forming a critical voice that questions the illusory logic of unlimited progress that supporters of neoliberalism propose" (40). Does this mean, one wonders, that all relevant works stand in direct opposition to the establishment as a whole, or do they connect to significant social or ideological movements that remain within the accepted rules of the states...