Artful Assassins: Murder as Art in Modern Mexico

Conclusions

179 Conclusions T he textual analyses presented in this study reveal the act of murder and assassination to be a platform on which the concept of the postrevolutionary Mexican nation is constructed and critiqued . In the decade of the 1920s, Mexican muralism and the novel of the Revolution offered organic interpretations of the violence of the armed movement and the assassination of its leading caudillos. These readings of the Revolution provided the basis for the creation of a historical narrative that erases the contradictory and chaotic nature of a ten-year period of social and political upheaval. The state-sponsored intelligentsia of early twentieth-century Mexico contributed to the artistic rendering of the national body, offering the first articulation of what decades later would become the postrevolutionary Mexican identity. This organic reinterpretation of murder and assassination likewise fostered a process of unification of power, through which emerged an “official” party that would come to embrace the majority of the ideological factions of the Revolution. Through this same process came the consolidation of the state apparatus, represented by the strength and authority of the president. In the 1920s and 1930s, the celebration of murder and assassination in Mexican arts and letters begins to fade. Martín Luis Guzmán’s 1929 novel La sombra del caudillo and Rodolfo Usigli’s 1938 play El gesticulador were the initiators of this change, espousing a critique of the material and symbolic abuses perpetrated by the state, which had previously been legitimized by the revolutionary narrative. In a parallel fashion, the members of the Contemporáneos group proposed the use of avant-garde, cosmopolitan, and European modes of representation as a means of allegorizing the fragmented and inorganic experience of early twentieth-century Mexican modernity. While doing so, this school of writers tried to resist the nationalistic impulse by manifesting the incongruities of the “autochthonous” postrevolutionary narrative. As I argued in Chapter 1, the Contemporáneos created a critique of the master narrative that had been used to facilitate Mexico’s entrance into modern nationhood. This critique was constructed by using Western art forms 180 ArtfulAssassins that refused to assimilate to the dominant notions of Mexicanness that emerged from the Revolution. The Contemporáneos body of work thus stood as a precedent for evading the national obligations “legitimately imposed” by the Revolution. The decade of the 1940s marks a change in the direction of the Mexican nation. Following the term of Manuel Ávila Camacho, the idea of Mexico became synonymous with the concept of progress. More precisely , this period marked the beginning of the state’s attempts to convert Mexico into the epitome of urban and industrial modernity. In contrast to previous years, the destiny of the Revolution was now seen as assimilating Mexico into the community of Western nations. The corpus I have analyzed in this book has its early roots in this era. By employing artful assassins whose criminal acts combine politics and aesthetics, Usigli ’s Ensayo de un crimen and Juan Bustillo Oro’s El hombre sin rostro make use of the conventions of the crime genre to reflect on the experience of modernity in Mexico as well as on the nation’s connections to the violence of its past and present. The Mexican crime genre emerges as a reflection and consequence of the country’s entrance into modernity. It can be argued that these texts in and of themselves are an image of modernity, albeit one that—unlike the art of the Contemporáneos—does not ignore issues related to the Revolution, the state, and the idea of Mexico. The examination of national issues in the novels of Usigli and Bustillo Oro reveals the weakening of the regime’s legitimacy, the violent neurosis of a state founded on masculine values, and a feeling of angst over the transformation Mexico had undergone during its “transition” to Western modernity. In Ensayo de un crimen, murder is related to a series of precepts having to do with the narrative strategies employed by the official Mexican intelligentsia, that is, the country’s cultural and artistic elite. These modalities reflected the canonical form of allegorizing Mexico’s entrance into modernity within artistic circles. In this context, mystery and detective fiction came to be considered a noncultured genre of massified art, lacking in prestige and sophistication. As we have seen, the Mexican crime novel allegorizes the process of Mexico’s incorporation into modernity , but does so from the cultural margins and without pretending to regenerate the “national...