Veracruz: Short Stories

There are many descriptors one may use to characterize Mexican literature, but the feature of contemporary literature commonly cited focuses on the split between "provincial" and "central" literary production. In the arts and culture in general, Mexico is a centralized pyramid structure which makes demands on the writer and other artists. For example, to achieve national status, the Mexican author must not only be read in Mexico City, the country's capitol; s/he must also be published, reviewed, and revered there. For the Mexican writer, to have an audience in the outer lying regions of the country is rarely significant; what really matters is the audience one may garner in the capitol city. That said, one quickly discovers, however, that an audience in the State of Veracruz does matter; Veracruz, a long strip of land facing the Gulf of Mexico, lies almost 300 miles east of Mexico City. This alleged condition of marginality—while viewed as a crippling descriptor for other regions on the outer fringes of the Mexico City axis—has certainly been scoffed at and left aside by the narrators Veracruz has produced. Even a writer as prominent as Carlos Fuentes has taken time on numerous occasions to inform his readers that his ancestors trace their lineage to the Gulf state, perhaps a hidden desire to latch on to Veracruz's rich literary history.

The five authors brought together in this issue of Callaloo represent a small sample of what has made Veracruz a prominent fixture in Mexican letters. Like the poetic texts also represented in this number of Callaloo, these five selections of fiction might surprise the unsuspecting reader with their thematic variety, as well as with their variety in language and location—all of which makes this writing both regional in the strictest confines of Mexican literature, yet cosmopolitan in their breadth and reach.

This gallery of narrators would not be complete without the inclusion of Sergio Pitol. Born in 1933 in the state of Puebla, Pitol arrived in Veracruz as a child. The elder statesman of Veracruz letters, Pitol's reach goes far beyond his adopted state's cultural borders, extending out to place him among Mexico's best regarded authors—indeed a living classic alongside José Emilio Pacheco, Elena Poniatowska, and Carlos Fuentes. An itinerant writer, Pitol's charges at various Mexican embassies throughout the world as well as his own will to satiate the nomadic necessities of his interminable wanderlust have transposed his surroundings from Xalapa, to Barcelona, to Berlin, to Bristol, to Moscow, and Rome, Paris, Warsaw, Peking, Vienna, and Srodborow, to name a few. While always returning to the winding Xalapa hills that he calls home, Pitol's narrative carries with it the connections he has made with the roads he travels. Author of more than twenty books spread out among short stories, novels, and essays, some of the more representative titles of his work are El taido de una flauta (The Sound of a Flute, 1972), El desfile del amor (The Parade of Love, 1984), Domar a la divina garza (Taming the Divine Heron, 1989), La vida conyugal (The Married Life, 1991), El arte de la fuga (The Art of the Escape, 1997), and El viaje (The Voyage, 2000). Throughout his texts, Pitol's masterful use of language, irony, imagination, and a sense of artistic creation that transgresses the purely literary stand out to make him a rara avis in Mexican letters.

Luis Arturo Ramos (1947) was born in Minatitlán, in the state of Veracruz. He is currently member of the teaching faculty of the Spanish MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Texas-El Paso. Ramos is the author of novels, short stories, chronicles, children's literature, and essays. Some of his work reflects a historical preoccupation with Veracruz. His novel Intramuros (Within these Walls, 1983) treats the arrival of the Spanish exiled during the Spanish Civil War and their subsequent tribulations as they struggle to regain the fleeting normalcy of their lives in...