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

Chapter Three. The Dream of Mestizo Mexico

135 Chapter Three The Dream of Mestizo Mexico Memory and History in Carmen Boullosa’s Cielos de la tierra History is bunk. Aldous Huxley Brave New World Like Chicano writer Alejandro Morales’s The Rag Doll Plagues, Mexican author Carmen Boullosa’s Cielos de la tierra (1997) examines the transformation of utopian dreams into apocalyptic nightmares in the colonial past, postrevolutionary present, and postnational future, pointing to the disjunction between nature and humanity.1 Dramatizing the paradox posed by the pursuit of industrialized development without regard for the cost to the environment and to humanity’s sense of community, Cielos de la tierra calls the reader’s attention to notions of power and knowledge deeply ingrained in the discourse of modernity.2 In addition, Boullosa develops the issue of the colonial construction of cultural difference—thematized in earlier works such as Son vacas, somos puercos (1988), Llanto: novelas imposibles (1992), and Duerme (1994)—emphasizing how the marginalization from history of indigenous knowledge in contemporary Mexican society is the product of several centuries of sedimentation . In this novel, Boullosa proposes the need to rethink the development of Mexico at the turn of the millennium when the project of nation initiated by the Mexican Revolution suffers its most dramatic historical crisis. Incorporating elements of science fiction, Cielos de la tierra questions Latin America’s new utopian goal of globalization through the representation of a dystopian future in which the by-products of industrialization —air pollution, destruction of the natural habitat, and dehumanization of society—have led to the annihilation of humanity. Through the juxtaposition of three different societies 136 Chapter Three where the utopian dream of progress has gone awry, Boullosa points to our need to learn from the teachings of history and literature in order to avoid the ecoapocalypse. In contrast to The Rag Doll Plagues, in which each plot occupied a separate section of the novel, Cielos de la tierra is composed of thirty-one fragments, alternating among three time periods: the colonial past in the initial decades following the conquest of Tenochtitlan; contemporary Mexico City; and a postapocalyptic future society named L’Atlàntide. In these fragments , Boullosa represents three different communities where the desire for a perfect society is expressed but never realized as each utopian dream becomes a dystopian nightmare. The first community is the religious utopia represented by the College of Santa Cruz de Tlatelolco in colonial New Spain, which strives to combine European learning with the knowledge of the indigenous communities after the fall of the Aztec empire. The second time frame represents contemporary Mexican society where we witness the projected utopia of integration through the model of racial and cultural mestizaje. And lastly, we have the super-technological future community of L’Atlàntide in which people live in the skies, since the earth has become uninhabitable as a result of pollution and nuclear fallout. In these different plots, Boullosa introduces protagonists who represent marginalized perspectives within their respective cultures. In colonial New Spain, we are introduced to the indigenous friar Hernando de Rivas who is one of the first native Mesoamerican children to be admitted to the College of Santa Cruz de Tlatelolco where he learns to write in Latin. In the contemporary time frame, Estela Díaz, an anthropologist living in twentieth-century Mexico City, rescues Hernando’s manuscript from oblivion after it has been hidden for five centuries . And finally, in the postapocalyptic L’Atlàntide, we find Lear, an archaeologist who searches for the human past while her society moves toward cultural and historical amnesia. Lear recomposes Hernando and Estela’s narratives, resulting in the final manuscript interweaving all three perspectives. The separate plots and temporal frames forming Boullosa’s novel are thus unified through the literary device of the newly found manuscript, which narrates the birth of Mexican modernity and forecasts the destruction of humanity. 137 The Dream of Mestizo Mexico In Cielos de la tierra, Boullosa highlights the problem of transmitting knowledge as the characters recover information from previous generations and convey it into the future. First of all, with the story of Hernando de Rivas in colonial New Spain, the problem lies in the difficulty of translating the surviving knowledge of indigenous societies to hegemonic forms of communication, in this case Latin. Then in postrevolutionary Mexico City, Estela takes on the task of translating Hernando’s manuscript from Latin to Spanish. And last...