The Uses of Failure in Mexican Literature and Identity

CONCLUSION. General Santa Anna’s Leg and Other Failings

CONCLUSION General Santa Anna’s Leg and Other Failings First there was error, then the death occurred, and now an eternal insight into the rocky barrenness of the human predicament prevails. —PAUL DE MAN (BLINDNESS, 225)¡De tu caduco ser das mustias señas con que con docta muerte y necia vida viviendo engañas y muriendo enseñas! —SOR JUANA, ‘‘ROSA DIVINA’’ (OBRAS, 1 : 278) [Your withering brings mortality’s reply. Wherefore with thoughtless life and thoughtful death, In dying you speak true, in life you lie!] —(TRUEBLOOD TRANSLATION, 99) We come to the end of our consideration of Mexico’s historical ‘‘pillars of our being,’’ a sweep of nearly five hundred years.We have focused on the figures who have come to represent those ‘‘pillars’’ and have seen a pattern emerge among these representatives: first they are surprised by failure, but then this surprise yields knowledge. This is true for most of the cases we have studied; but the two most recent, Fuentes and Gómez-Peña, are slightly different. Bound up in postmodernity’s penchant for irony and rhetorical self-awareness, neither of them is overcome by failure—at least not in the same epiphanic and redemptive sense as the others—and indeed they might not even be genuine ‘‘failures ’’ (Fuentes for one is quite clearly a success). Yet both are keenly aware of, and even court, failure. Theirs is a performance of failure, in that they both profit from the representation of it. This is perhaps possible because of the particular historical and aesthetic conditions of the late twentieth century and early twenty-first century, a self-reflexive stage of culture in what Northrop Frye would call the ‘‘mythos of winter ’’ (Anatomy, 223–239): failure has perhaps reached such a recogniz- able form and pattern that can be simulated and even manipulated. Fuentes and Gómez-Peña, having learned well from history, embody the form of failure, even if they do not actually suffer from it (and perhaps , as Paz insists that Mexicans ‘‘profesamos [amor] a la forma’’ [we profess love for form], these two Mexicans have applied that love to failure [Laberinto, 29]).1 In terms of the gainful employment of failure, one could also point to the recent example of the monolithic PRI, which after losing the presidency for the first time in seventy years (some would say it merely yielded it temporarily) lately has been staging a well-calculated comeback.2 The border (Gómez-Peña’s emblem)—the national monument corresponding to the most recent of the historical ‘‘pillars of our being,’’ the diaspora of the last fifty years—is an apt sign for this late-stage use of failure. The border is liminality embodied. It is literally a threshold that, once crossed, changes the crossers forever. In good postmodern fashion it also subverts the usual function of monuments.They are normally built by a state in order to recall and mythologize an event, a person, or a field of honor. But the border is an unplanned monument, a constant reminder of a painful historical process that is ongoing. It is also a working part of this continuing event. The ‘‘fence and the river’’ (as Claire Fox poetically refers to it) is the physical line that is constantly breached and stands at once for containment and porosity. It is both a negative and a positive monument: a negative testament to the national failures of the Mexican economy and the U.S. police state, but also a positive one to countless migrants and to the culture they are transforming with their odyssey. Because of this polyvalence, it is an open symbol. But the border is also, in Gloria Anzaldúa’s terms, an herida abierta [open wound] (Borderlands, 3), a definition that applies to all the sore points of Mexican history, the rest of the historical landmarks we have considered: the Conquest, Independence, and the Revolution. All are hobbled victories, Fuentes’s ‘‘crushing defeats’’ leaving wounds that have in turn left monuments that are themselves maimed. In the middle of modern Mexican history we find a famous literal wound belonging to the most pernicious military caudillo of the new nation, Antonio López de Santa Anna (1791–1876), known as ‘‘benemérito de la patria’’ [well-deserving of the fatherland]. Santa Anna presided over one of the most resounding failures in Mexican history, the loss of half the Mexican territory to the United States in...