Utopian Dreams, Apocalyptic Nightmares: Globalization in Recent Mexican and Chicano Narrative (review)

Miguel López Lozano’s book approaches works by Mexican and Chicano authors that seek to problematize Mexico’s entry to the global market and neoliberal politics through the representation of dystopian futures—always related to past histories—as a means of subverting the all too easy narratives of progress promised by the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). This transition is used by all literary works discussed in the book as a temporal marker that both signals the beginning of an apocalyptic era and the possibility for rethinking past political programs, which, although credited with the aim of advancing human progress, resulted in unjust systems aimed at the creation of subaltern classes, the exploitation of those classes, and the erasure of their knowledge. The readings promote a critique of such dynamics of erasure, a historical linkage between current global capital and past colonial experiences, and the opening up of the political field to alternative ways of organizing life in order to avoid such apocalyptic destinies.

The book comprises an introduction, four chapters devoted to the analysis of particular authors, and a conclusion. The novels analyzed are Carlos Fuentes’s Cristobal Nonato (1987); Alejandro Morales’s The Rag Doll Plagues (1992); Carmen Boullosas’s Cielos de la tierra (1997); and Homero Aridjis’s La leyenda de los soles (1993) and ¿En quién piensas cuando haces el amor? (1996). The introduction sets up the main threads of the analysis by emphasizing the history of the Americas as a place upon which Western civilization expounded the designs of utopia, creating at once the conditions of exclusion for its possibility and the beginning of a political tradition that would feed subsequent waves of utopian projects. The main argument centers on the imposition of the Enlightenment project as a passage to modernity, with the double effect of articulating American natives as an Other from whom Europeans could create their own identity, and the coupling of such subjects with a nature over which culture and civilization had to perform a mastery so that progress could be achieved. The dystopian narratives commented upon enact a recounting of these histories of subjugation on behalf of prosperity, from the Spanish colonial project to the national agendas that followed it, and up to the current process of globalization.

The analysis of the works functions as a crescendo. Fuentes’s novel narrates, in prophetic character, the signing of the trade agreement at the juncture of 500 years since the “discovery” of America. The novel presents Mexico City and Acapulco as sites of industrial waste and pollution due to the lack of governmental responsibility toward industrial and urban development, setting up the theme around which the book’s reflection will revolve, mainly the use of dystopian narratives that counteract the utopian projects inscribed over urban (Mexico City) and natural (Acapulco) spaces. The book’s arc is completed by the discussion of Aridjis’s works through which López Lozano articulates the possibility of an ecofeminism that, being more just in its relationship to nature and minorities, would escape the traps of previous political projects.

However, the chapters devoted to Boullosa and Morales present the most interesting analyses in their depiction of Mexico City and Los Angeles as bodies in movement and decay. Morales’s novel traces a virtual time in which a generation of doctors fights different epidemics that point to the failures of modernity and their need to be supplemented by marginalized knowledge. In an extreme vision of global market dynamics, Morales portrays the making of Mexican bodies into commodities whose blood can be used to support the health of upper-class Americans, while Boullosas’s work points to the need to readdress historical identities in their linkage to national projects. In these two chapters López Lozano analyzes the important tropes of mestizaje and the exploitation of subaltern bodies within global markets as fundamental points of Mexican and Chicano...