Death in el D.F.: Urban Fantasy in Aguilar Mora, Ramirez, Fuentes, and Blanco

Between 1979 and 1983, Jorge Aguilar Mora, Armando Ramírez, Carlos Fuentes, and José Joaquín Blanco all published fictions that struggle between representing Mexico City as they see it and imagining Mexico City as they want it to be: Aguilar Mora's massive exploration of masks and forgetfulness in Si muero lejos de ti (If I Die Far from You 1979); Ramírez's poetic fantasy of underclass revenge in Violación en Polanco (Rape in Polcanco 1980); the bourgeois coming-of-age story "El día de las madres" ("Mothers Day") from Fuentes's Agua quemada (Burnt Water 1981); and Blanco's depiction of urban gay life in Las púberes canéforas (The Flower Girls 1983). These authors critically explore the multiple forms of violence that support Mexico City's modern aspirations. However, they also impose upon the city agrid of violent personal fantasy, manifesting strikingly common patterns in their attempts to appropriate the city as a viable home for Mexican male authorship.

These literary texts employ many of the same representational strategies as internationally successful urban films produced some twenty years later like Amores perros (2000) and Y tu mamá también (2001). Such films have achieved a great deal of commercial success and recognition for their realist depiction of violence and social conflict in contemporary Mexico City. They graphically show physical and / or psychological violence by including a number of documentary-style film techniques: showing the same scene from a variety of different camera angles; using anonymous voice-overs to "explain" historical events; making visual references to specific colonia in the city; placing clear temporal markers to establish historical context. The films' display of violence causes strong, immediate reactions in spectators by seeming to place us in the urban scene.

One might assume that the films portray urban violence more forcefully than the written texts. After all, they are produced much later, in an era of increased social conflict, and their overt manipulation of visual and sound effects provides viewers with a visceral sense of the chaotic, threatening city. This apparent access to the real city, however, is not the exclusive domain of film. The earlier short stories and novels I examine here also portray urban brutality through realist conventions, using techniques proper to literature: detailed description, chronological narrative segments, verbal references to specific colonias, temporal markers, and slang. In addition, these literary texts rely on their narrators' carefully limited gaze to situate, contextualize, and frame our view of city spaces. Thus, like the later films, they employ specific focalization strategies to achieve the cinematic effect of placing us in the supposedly real city.

While in this sense both groups of texts render Mexico City cinematographically, the stories they set in the city are markedly different. Curiously, the writers who attempted to show urban fragmentation and pain around 1980 designed plots that were far more violent than those of the graphic films twenty years later. In the films, the plots appear just as fragmented and disordered as the cityscape. In the same way that they visually resist readerly desire to connect disparate elements of Mexico City into one seamless image, the films also resist tying up loose ends of their plots into conventionally satisfying, totalizing conclusions. Maintaining this parallelism between city structure and story structure, the films offer plots fueled mostly by alienation and miscommunication rather than by physical violence. In contrast, vicious rapes and murders drive plot in the literary texts. The greater dependence on violence in the earlier works, I would like to argue, is motivated by a fundamental incommensurability between the city the authors were trying to describe and the urban authorial identity they wanted to embody. As the plots of their fictions reveal, Jorge Aguilar Mora, Armando Ramírez, Carlos Fuentes, and José Joaquín Blanco still saw themselves as privileged observers who should be able to consolidate urban fragmentation into cohesive stories. Their inability to do so led them to express extremely violent, masculinist fantasies of mastery as they plotted their narratives. Blending cinematic...