Utopian Dreams, Apocalyptic Nightmares: Globilization in Recent Mexican and Chicano Narrative

Chapter Four

175 Chapter Four Surviving the Ecoapocalypse in Homero Aridjis’s La leyenda de los soles and ¿En quién piensas cuando haces el amor? If they give you ruled paper, write the other way. Juan Ramón Jiménez, epigraph to Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 While in the previous chapters, we read how Morales’s The Rag Doll Plagues and Carmen Boullosa’s Cielos de la tierra trace a pattern of racial exclusion and ecological devastation of nature in three different time periods, in Homero Aridjis’s novels, we see the environmental and human cost of industrialization in Mexico City in a single time frame, a hypothetical 2027. While Latin American officials and intellectuals were debating the implications of the then upcoming Quincentenary of the Discovery of America, in the late 1980s and into the 1990s, the Mexican author published several literary works dealing with the ramifications of colonial contact for the project of nation in Mexico.1 Aridjis began with the historical novels 1492: vida y tiempos de Juan Cabezón de Castilla (1492: The Life and Times of Juan Cabezón of Castile, 1985) and Memorias del Nuevo Mundo (Memories of the New World, 1988), in which the past is rewritten through the lens of the present. He further explores transhistorical themes in La leyenda de los soles (Legend of the Suns, 1993) and ¿En quién piensas cuando haces el amor? (Who Do You Think of When Making Love?, 1996),2 this time utilizing the powerful imagery provided by the science fiction genre to present a playful combination of popular culture and ecological criticism in order to project a disfigured image of Mexico one generation into the future. These latter two novels underscore the capacity of dystopian writing to criticize the present environmental deterioration and social stratification of 176 Chapter Four Mexican society, while suggesting alternative possibilities for the future. Building on Carlos Fuentes’s depiction of the capital in Cristóbal Nonato, both of Aridjis’s futuristic novels center on Mexico City in the early twenty-first century when the deplorable living conditions have been further exacerbated by the effects of ill-planned development, massive migration from the countryside, and an autocratic government, turning the Mexican capital into an apocalyptic nightmare. Most originally, in these two novels, the author uses the Aztec myth of the Fifth Sun as a metaphor for the devastating effects of industrialization, poorly planned growth, and political corruption, symbolizing the crisis of Mexican modernity. Both La leyenda de los soles and ¿En quién piensas cuando haces el amor? find in the Mesoamerican myth of the Fifth Sun their inspiration for describing the effects of rapid modernization on contemporary Mexico, thus linking the past with the future in creative fashion. The title of the former novel links it to the historical Leyenda de los soles (also known as the Chimalpopoca Codex), a colonial document written by an anonymous scribe working in the College of Santa Cruz de Tlatelolco, under the direction of fray Bernardino de Sahagún.3 According to the surviving accounts, at the time when the Spanish conquistadors arrived in the Valley of Mexico, the Aztecs believed they were living in the fifth era of creation (the Fifth Sun) and that four previous suns had been destroyed. They believed that Omehtecuhtli, the original creative duality, unfolded in forces representative of the four elements, earth, air, fire, and water, and that each in turn had created its own respective sun. The First Sun’s inhabitants were giants, and their era ended when ocelots devoured those who lived under its sign. The Second Sun was destroyed by wind, and its people were turned into monkeys. The Third Sun ended engulfed in fiery rain and volcanic eruptions, and its inhabitants turned into butterflies, dogs, and turkeys. The Fourth Sun was destroyed by floods, and those who lived during this time became fish. Lastly, the Fifth Sun differentiates itself from the other four in that it represents cosmic balance because no single element predominates. According to the Aztec cosmovision, for every sun destroyed, a new one, better equipped and stronger, emerged until the era of the Fifth Sun. 177 Surviving the Ecoapocalypse Nevertheless, the Aztecs held that the Fifth Sun was marked for destruction as well, this time by earthquakes and famine, and just as in the case of the previous four, after its destruction, a...