Artful Assassins: Murder as Art in Modern Mexico

Acknowledgments

ix Acknowledgments T he present version of this study would not exist without the effort and knowledge of Stephen Clark, to whom I am also indebted for his cleverly coining the first half of the book’s title. My thanks to him and his wife, Elma Cano, for their patience during the long sessions of writing and revising. I would also like to thank Eli Bortz, acquisitions editor at Vanderbilt University Press, for believing in this project from the outset. To Glen S. Close and Robert Buffington, our thanks for their insightful and meticulous reading of the manuscript. I would like to acknowledge the professors I studied under at the University of Colorado at Boulder: Emilio Bejel, Leopoldo Bernucci, Ricardo Landeira, Peter Elmore, Leila Gómez, Luis González del Valle, and José Manuel del Pino. My special thanks to Juan Pablo Dabove, adviser, colleague, and friend, whose guidance during the first version of this study was crucial. Many thanks to Mary K. Long, compatriot of the Republic of Mexican Letters, whose generous friendship contributed much to the publication of this book, and to the friends and colleagues of my youth, who are now employed by several different universities: Jesús Ernesto Ortiz Díaz, Elizabeth Goldberg, Itzá Zavala-Garrett, and Amanda Petersen. Special thanks to my friend, colleague, and compa- ñera de viaje, Aileen El-Kadi. I am grateful to the chair of the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures at Portland State University, Sandra Freels, for her support and guidance. Thanks to the entire department and to PSU’s College of Liberal Arts, particularly to Dean Marvin Kaiser for his assistance in securing the financial support necessary to finish this project and to cover the cost of the illustrations. For their insightful readings and encouragement, I would also like to acknowledge my PSU colleagues Patricia Wetzel, Anousha Sedighi, Annabelle Dolidon, Roberto de Anda, and Maude Hines. For their support, my sincere gratitude goes to my colleagues of the Spanish Section: Delys Ostlund, Cynthia Sloan, Robert Sanders, Eva Núñez, and Oscar Fernández. I would like to thank the institutions and individuals who provided x ArtfulAssassins the permissions for reproducing the artwork included in this book, as well as the reproductions themselves: the Cineteca Nacional and the director of its archives, Ángeles Sánchez Gutiérrez; María Eugenia Berm údez de Ferrer and Sebastián Cárdenas Vesga of the Fundación Olga y Rufino Tamayo; plastic artist Emiliano Gironella and El Aire Centro de Arte in Mexico City; María Fernanda Meza of the Artists Rights Society in New York; and the National Institute of Anthropology and History of Mexico. I wish to express my sincere gratitude to Oro Films, S. A. de C. V., and to its president and general director, Gonzalo Elvira Sánchez de Aparicio, and his son, film producer Gonzalo Elvira Álvarez, for having authorized the use of images from the film El hombre sin rostro for the cover and the text of this book. I am likewise indebted to Altavista Films and its director, Mónica Serrano Lozano, for permission to reproduce one frame of the final sequence of Amores perros. My sincere admiration and gratitude go to sculptor Javier Marín for having personally provided the photograph of one of his works. I also thank Guadalupe Celis and Jimena Oliver of Terreno Baldío Arte, which houses some of Marín’s work in Mexico City. I am also indebted to Gabriel Ortiz, for having taken and granted permission for me to use his photographs of Del porfirismo a la Revoluci ón, by David Alfaro Siqueiros; to Luís Miguel León, of the Museo de Arte Moderno in Mexico City, for providing reproductions and information on securing permissions; to film director Jaime Aparicio, docu­ mentarian Juan Ramón Aupart, researcher Fernando del Moral, and writer William Rodríguez, for their guidance throughout my search for information on securing rights; and to Clynio Hernández, for his assistance in brainstorming ideas for the cover design of this book. I thank the members of the Latin American Studies Reading Group of Portland—Elliott Young, Marie Sarita Gaytán, and Freddy Orlando Vilches Meneses, all of Lewis and Clark College, and Hillary Jenks, of PSU—whose comments and suggestions contributed to the evolution of this study. And I am grateful to the students in the graduate seminar on the Mexican crime novel during the spring 2009 quarter at PSU, the first intelligent...