Cuando México se (re)apropia de Texas: Ensayos / When Mexico Recaptures Texas: Essays by Carmen Boullosa (review)

Carmen Boullosa, one of Mexico’s leading novelists, poets, and playwrights, explores a range of forgotten transnational histories in her essay collection Cuando México se (re)apropia de Texas: Ensayos / When Mexico Recaptures Texas: Essays. The book brings together twenty-nine short essays that highlight connections across transnational spaces and time. The majority of them use a historical event or figure as a way to engage in reflection on a range of topics, including chronologies of borderland violence, transnational or global economies, capitalism, colonization, immigration, art, religion, and love. Although the title When Mexico Recaptures Texas suggests a focus on the Texas-Mexico borderlands, this collection also touches on transnational stories of various Latin American countries and the United States, Mexico-Spain, France-Mexico, and the colonial histories of the Indigenous populations within what became the United States.

Boullosa’s eclectic style adds to the appeal of these essays and their range of topics. Rather than approach historical events or figures from a purely historical and academic point of view, she displays her novelistic and poetic flare in a hybrid style that allows her to reflect on topics rather than just state facts, resisting the conventions of academic essay writing. For those unacquainted with Latin American postmodern literature, her essays may appear unorganized, often seeming to digress on tangents and asides. “Spurs and Guayaberas,” for example, reflects on the life of Lorenzo de Zavala (1788–1836), the nineteenth-century Mexican and Texas politician, providing background information on de Zavala but also making rief references to Octavio Paz’s resignation of his ambassadorship to India, Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina and the Darmstadt Society of Forty, and the cattle economy of Texas and Yucatan (hence the essay’s title), concluding in a manner typical of Boullosa’s writing:

Zavala retired from public life for health reasons. It was November, it was cold. He was rowing his boat, and it capsized (a lovely word) in the narrow river (a bayou) where the Battle of San Jacinto had been fought. After a good soaking in the freezing water, Zavala contracted pneumonia and died.

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While the book contains both the original Spanish and an English translation, I find it important to locate Boullosa’s writing within a Latin American postmodern style that attempts to break with traditional conventions as a type of postcolonial and even feminist “writing back” that resists male Eurocentric writing conventions. Paired with often-overlooked events—such as the short-lived transnational cotton economy of Mexico and the US Confederacy, the Seminole Indians’ and escaped slaves’ migration into Mexico and resulting US laws, or a children’s classroom revolt in Arizona against a substitute teacher—Boullosa’s quirky writing style is itself a disruption and a subversion of hegemonic concepts of history, canon, and essay writing.

Precisely because of the eclectic nature of these essays, however, what is lacking in When Mexico Recaptures Texas is an introduction by a scholar or the author that could serve as an anchor for the reader. A scholarly introduction could locate the essays within a larger transnational and historical context. Another option would have been a reflection on the essays and topics by the author herself. Even written in a style consistent with the essays themselves, Boullosa’s own musing on her interest in this range of archival and contemporary subjects as well as the title choice, which highlights only one of the many transnational relations explored in the collection, would have benefited the reader.

The reflective nature of the essays in When Mexico Recaptures Texas cleverly enacts the complicated nature of intertwined global histories and therefore provides entry points for readers and educators alike into transnational studies, postcolonial studies, postmodernism, Latin American studies, and American literature. Boullosa collapses musing on people, places, and events in unique ways and weaves together the past and the present across space. For...