Utopías inquietantes. Narrativa proletaria en México (review)

Studies of proletarian literature are thin on the shelves, especially if you limit your inquiry to the turbulent decade of post-Revolutionary Mexico. Bertín Ortega's Utopías inquietantes: narrativa proletaria en México (2008) focuses on novels produced in the thirties (some published in the early forties). Many will of course recognize La ciudad roja by Jorge Mancisidor (1932), one of very few works of the genre to survive the collective amnesia that may banish works such as the proletarian novel of Mexico from a brief stay in the canon, or at least from the limited knowledge its country's miniscule readership had held of it. Any but the most devoted students of that era in Mexican literature, of that genre of writing, or perhaps of cultural, subaltern or postcolonial studies, will most likely be learning for the first time in Ortega's Utopías inquietantes of socialist works written by Miguel Bustos Cerecedo (Un sindicato escolar. Novela corta infantil, 1936); Gustavo Ortiz Hernán (Chimeneas, 1937); Mario Pavón Flores ("El entierro" and "Los gusanos rojos," 1943, written c. 1935); Enrique Othón Díaz (Protesta, 1937); Fortino López R. (Amaneceres, 1937); Jesús Guerrero (Los olvidados, 1944); Raúl Carrancá y Trujillo (Camaradas, 1938); Eduardo J. Correa (La comunista de los ojos café, 1933), o Francisco Sarquís (Mezclilla, 1933).

I mention these authors in no chronological order, for neither does Bertín Ortega. This study presents them to readers with respect to themes not easily perceived at first, and repetitiously throughout the five chapters of the work. At times it seems clear that a work is mentioned—for one example—in chapter four's "El comunismo cristiano," because most socialist writers of the thirties are self-declared anticlerical, if not atheist communist, and a primary narrative focus of Correa's La comunista de los ojos café falls on the grim government-church power struggle over the revolutionary constitution's articles 3, 5, 27 and 130. These severely limit the Catholic church's historically vast powers. The fact that President Calles enforced these secularizing laws led directly to the Cristiada, the vicious religious war of 1926–1929 (153–54).

While the analysis of Correa's novel in chapter four is clear and logical, the redundant citation of various other texts—in particular, Ortiz Hernán's Chimeneas, Othón Díaz's Protesta, Bustos Cerecedo's Sindicato, and Carrancá y Trujillo's Camaradas—causes this reader, at least, to wish for tighter organization overall throughout the study, which suffers from notable repetition and outright redundancy (see, for example, the fairly lengthy quote repeated on pages 78 and 117). When the repetition is not word for word, the same quite fundamental concepts are stated over and over again, from beginning to end of the book.

These concepts represent the essential ideology, themes Ortega calls standard elements in all of Mexico's proletarian novels. The first is the critical contrast with the Mexican Revolution and the "new" socialist workers revolution. The novelists believe in the Revolution as a positive start but they point out factors that corrupted the war's goals; now the people must see that the Revolution's demands for social justice are carried out. That calls up the second pan-motif of this genre: the need for workers to organize. A third theme calls for city and rural workers to put aside differences to oppose corrupt government and syndicate leaders as one. An additional, novel concept, is developed in Mezclilla, in which the protagonist is a woman who fights for equal treatment for women and enjoys some success...