Vrbe: Marxism and the Imagination of the Mexican City in the 1920s

One of the most thrilling and difficult challenges a city can present to those in charge of representing and imagining it rests on the task of taming the sudden and dynamic emergence of social subjects in it. In his novel Santa (1903), Porfirian intellectual Federico Gamboa registers, with clear anxiety, the perspective of many members of the elite overwhelmed by the masses. Instead of the city of beautiful boulevards desired by Francophile intellectuals like Gamboa, the Porfirian capitalist fiction was bursting at the seams with the pressure of a large lower-class population that claimed its right to occupy and enjoy the city’s space. In Gamboa’s telling, the celebration of Independence Day was characterized by a mob (“una turba”) blocking the carriages of the elite and disturbing public peace. The metaphors used by Gamboa to invoke the crowd are telling: an ocean (“océano,” “mediterráneo”) or a monster (“monstruo”). The rhetorical figures develop in a crescendo (all the way to words such as ‘turbamulta’ or ‘crowd-multitude’ and ‘concierto-monstruo’ or ‘monster-concert’) that ultimately represents the sense of anxiety felt by the members of the elite, who decide to leave their carriages and take refuge at the “Café París,” which allows them to avoid the crowd and watch it from the comfort of a balcony (140-45). The revolutionary explosion that swept Mexico less than a decade after Gamboa published his novel was, in a way, the realization of the nightmare implicit in his fearful and moralistic characterization of the populace. The Revolution was conducted in part by those very subjects who blocked the advance of the carriages during Independence Day, many of them members of the labor unions, anarchist movements and social organizations that would be mobilized in the city. By 1919, when the dust settled and a new Mexican constitution brought to the fore a wide array of popular subjects protected in part by the labor reforms achieved by anarchist influence (Hodges 15-16; Lear 143-91), Mexico City became a place of promise and a site to project many expectations of the future. As Mauricio Tenorio-Trillo puts it,

in 1919 the city’s inhabitants felt part of a changing world, as frightened about the future and as happy about the end of massacres as the inhabitants of European cities were.

(95)

Still, as Tenorio-Trillo also points out,

[t]he benign global fascination with violence, revolution and race that Mexico City represented had a different meaning for the city’s own intelligentsia. It was as if the city were lost in its own chaotic essaying.

(95)

After the wind of insurrection that swept the country for a decade, the dream of a modern city and the nightmare of its inhabitants conjured by Gamboa were largely reconfigured.

While Mexico City became a hotbed of intellectual activity, produced by national and foreign artists and thinkers alike, the imagination of the urban became a site of contention between writers of different ideological stripes, in order to establish a symbolic code to domesticate the unleashed presence of the new post-revolutionary subjects. In what follows, I will analyze the way in which literature became an instrument to symbolically discern the new urban cartography and to imagine a potential proletarian revolution in a moment of literary indeterminacy of the cityspace.¹ I have argued elsewhere that the period following the Mexican Revolution opened a set of signifiers (such as ‘revolution’ and ‘national literature’) to a struggle for their definition on the part of the different intellectuals contending to dominate the new post-revolutionary literary field.² Following this idea, I will argue here that Mexican literature of the period uses the city as one of these signifiers to create cultural capital and a symbolic economy to re-order a dynamic urban space with previously unrepresented subjectivities. In order to conduct this analysis, I will invoke Marxism at two levels. On the one hand, I will read the way in which socialist writers sought to define the city as a proletarian space, as conservatives and liberals...