Narrating Narcos: Culiacán and Medellín

3. The Author, the Crime, the Idiot, and the Language of the Narcos

64 3 The Author, the Crime, the Idiot, and the Language of the Narcos Élmer Mendoza picked me up from the hotel at 9:20 in the morning and took me to La Mariposa Amarilla for a typical norteño breakfast.1 The restaurant is located somewhere between the city center and the outskirts of town. It is one of those urban hybrid zones between pavement and dirt, between highway and railroad. It is nestled amid middle-class houses and shacks, a place where the extremes of the tropics coexist— its exuberance and its perils, its beauty and its unpleasantness. The tables are arranged in a tent-covered field amid a garden full of plants, trees, and enormous vines. The ground was still damp from the previous night’s rain. Since there were no more empty tables in the roofed garden, we were seated at a table at the edge of the deck, between the kitchen and the riverbank. Ducks were quacking, and the smell of cinnamon , used to brew local coffee, imbued the humid air. I had contacted Mendoza after reading his work, before arriving in Culiacán. I was aware of his reputation both in Mexico and abroad, and wanted to talk about the environment that had inspired him and made possible two of his novels: Un asesino solitario (published in 1999) and El amante de Janis Joplin (published in 2001). I wanted to know how Mendoza defines the challenges he faces as a writer living in a society overrun by the violence of the narcotics trade. Mendoza studied engineering , a profession that he practiced until he was twenty-eight, when he decided to become a writer. Through the course of our conversation, I realized that there is a balance between Mendoza the writer who knows his craft, and the public persona he developed over more than a decade ago, when his books made him famous. He is not afraid of the labels that critics attribute to his work, he told me, because they do not change his commitment to the craft of writing. “I have learned to tell critics and the media what they like to hear,” Mendoza confessed, laughing play- the author, the CrIme, the IDIot, anD the lanGuaGe oF the narCos 65 fully. Without a doubt, in our dialogue he used the precise words that he imagined I sought. Mendoza commented to me that he knows that once published, his work no longer belongs to him.2 He enjoys the fact that followers of crime novels adopt his work as part of the genre. He does not conceive of his work as necessarily political, but he does not mind when critics describe it as such. Although he has not been exclusively focused on narrating the local narcotics trade, this seems to be what chiefly characterizes his work, as he is considered the foremost Sinaloan writer on the subject.3 Mendoza knows the difference between the writer’s craft and that of the critics. In September 2005 the magazine Letras Libres dealt with narco trafficking and literature. One of the articles, written by the critic Rafael Lemus, described norteña literature and its authors with a bit of disdain: “A story about narcotics, a typical strategy: detailed costumbrism , colloquial language, populist plots. Costumbrismo is typically simplistic. Sometimes it almost completely excludes invention, as if the imagination could add nothing to reality” (“Balas de salva,” 39).4 Mendoza told me that Lemus’s piece had provoked several responses, and that right after its publication, Mendoza had received many calls from reporters from Mexico City, asking for his opinions on the matter. The following issue of Letras Libres dealt exclusively with this controversial debate. Mendoza commented that the ensuing uproar propelled that issue of the journal to record-breaking sales. Despite the centralized— and provincial—view evident in the tone of some literary critics from Mexico City toward the northern region’s literary production, Mendoza spoke about this with wise irony. From his comments I gathered that, although at that time Rafael Lemus was a fairly unknown critic, the debate he had instigated had served as much to bring renewed vitality to the magazine as to place the topic of narco trafficking and literature in the local criticism glossary. For Mendoza this centralismo manifested itself much more strongly during the International Book Fair in Guadalajara in 2005, when the well-known writer Carlos Fuentes organized a panel called “New Mexican Literature.” The panel did not include any of...