Documents in Crisis: Nonfiction Literatures in Twentieth-Century Mexico by Beth E Jörgensen (review)

In the first chapter of this critical and conceptual analysis of Mexican non-fiction of the last century, Beth Jörgensen rehearses extant literature on the truth genre to lay the theoretical foundation of her readings. Research discussed in the preliminary chapter includes Western theories of language and representation, poststructuralist and deconstructionist concepts most famously advanced by Paul Ricoeur, Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Hayden White and Linda Hutcheon (to name a few). She links these to the debate twenty-five years ago over the generic identity of such celebrated works as Elena Poniatowska’s Hasta no verte, Jesús mío and the curious nature of the then-emerging form called testimonio. She speaks, as well, of those scholars who in the seventies and eighties most pointedly contributed to our understanding today of the binary nature of, for example, the chronicle (literary journalism: reportage and aesthetic impact) or the constructed truths of the autobiography. The theories inform her study of a number of nonfiction genres in the five following chapters: of autobiography, testimonio and ethno-autobiography, the memoir, the historical essay and the modern-day chronicle practiced by Elena Poniatowska, Carlos Monsiváis and Juan Villoro, among others. Her theoretically-framed readings contribute intelligently to the perceived prominence of nonfiction in Mexico, where citizens may feel a particularly acute need to “impose order on the chaotic events of periods of social crisis through the meaning-making activities of storytelling” (30).

Jörgensen groups her analyses of several autobiographical texts around the organizing topos of the Mexican Revolution. She examines Martín Luis Guzmán’s El águila y la serpiente as nonfiction whose language, however, imposes powerful claims to fictional status on the text. Even more putative status as nonfiction is ascribed to Guzmán’s Las memorias de Pancho Villa, a supposedly first-person account which is in fact told by the author. Rediscovered in the seventies, Nellie Campobello’s autobiographical Cartucho appears more fictional than her hero-worshiping biography, Apuntes de la vida militar de Pancho Villa. In Jörgensen’s view, Anita Brenner’s The Wind that Swept Mexico may have the closest “disciplinary affiliation” with nonfiction, if only because her language is or seems to be less studiedly poetic than Guzmán’s and Campobello’s. Readers will glean a nuanced appreciation of the varied faces of both history and autobiography in this chapter.

The author continues her examination of the life story in the following chapter, with detailed analyses of the writings of José Vasconcelos and María Luisa Puga. Theories other than the classic Lejeune definition of autobiography are brought to bear on Jörgensen’s new look at old stories, as she explores the paradigmatic guides to reading for a problematical truth genre whose subject is a pre- existing real person but whose treatment of the subjectivity of that person contributes to doubts about the truth of what is being told. Jörgensen applies concepts of memory and intertexuality to the Ateneísta’s Ulises criollo, and to three works by María Luisa Puga: De cuerpo entero: el espacio de la escritura, Crónicas de una oriunda del kilómetro X en Michoacán and Diario del dolor, the last published shortly before Puga’s death. To illustrate the perennially slippery definition of genre for these works—the varied ways in which they are perceived—, Jörgensen includes results of a Dewey Decimal search, discovering that the diverse designations for a book can at times lead it to be “stunningly mis-shelved” (95). No doubt we have all felt that frisson of shock when we find a book we “know” to be literature shelved in the section on history. The works analyzed in this revelatory book seem to wander all over the library in their search for a firm disciplinary label.

In another chapter on life writing, the author focuses on the by-now recognized subgenre of testimonio and on...