Trauma and Historiography in Hugo Hiriart’s La destrucción de todas las cosas

In La destrucción de todas las cosas Hugo Hiriart utilizes the science fiction trope of an extraterrestrial invasion to place in dramatic relief the effects of the resulting trauma that repetitive foreign invasions—commencing with the sixteenth century Spanish Conquest—has had on Mexicans and their sense of a doomed national history. This analysis focuses on the nature of the trauma the first-person narrator Esteban is experiencing, and how this, in turn, informs and determines his thought processes and writing style in penning the historiography of this apocalyptic event in his country. The pointed use of parody in this novel—from descriptions of the extraterrestrials and their customs to the president to other texts, etc.—underscores the distorted perspective of trauma experienced by Esteban which intensifies his feelings of Suvinian cognitive estrangement when confronting Martians.