Artful Assassins: Murder as Art in Modern Mexico

Introduction

1 Introduction I n the early 1920s, Mexico came into being as a grand narrative built upon the Revolution of 1910. One of the foundational elements of this narrative construct known as modern Mexico has been the act of assassination and murder , both in artistic representation and in historical fact. Death scenes, principally the assassinations of the five leading­ caudillos of the Revolution—Francisco I. Madero, Venustiano Carranza, Emiliano Zapata, Francisco (Pancho) Villa, and Álvaro Obregón—served as the cornerstone for the creation of a stable narrative of the armed struggle. In this narrative, violence was relegated to the past, from which it was viewed as the impetus for the unification of the disparate ideological agendas of the various factions that had waged the ten-year war. The arts, most specifically muralism and novel of the Revolution, played a key role in the construction of this narrative, which attempted to camouflage the contradictions of the Revolution through a celebratory representation of its violence. In the 1920s, both art forms contributed to the imaginary construction of the postrevolutionary Mexican nation. Later, starting in the 1940s and continuing to the end of the twentieth century, the symbolic foundation of this narrative—a stable and homogenized portrayal of the violent revolutionary past produced by the reinterpretation of assassination and murder—underwent a process of progressive unraveling through the conventions of mystery and detective fiction, both in literature and in film. This book is a study of assassination and murder in Mexican crime fiction and film. It presents an analysis of the death scene as a platform on which the concept of the postrevolutionary nation is constructed and critiqued in twentieth-century Mexico. All of the works studied herein use the act of killing in relation to the concept of Mexican nationhood, and all are considered among the most important works of the Mexican 2 ArtfulAssassins crime genre. Furthermore, in these novels and films, assassination and murder are linked to a series of precepts that stand in opposition to the norms of artistic production embraced by the official Mexican intelligentsia and the country’s cultural luminaries. These elite groups played a major role in allegorizing Mexico’s entrance into urban and industrial modernity starting in the 1940s. Mexican crime fiction likewise allegorizes this process of modernization in an attempt to construct, revive, or critique the “soul of the nation,” but from a very different vantage point. This study of Mexican crime fiction, through a tripartite focus on the Revolution, Mexico City, and the concept of national identity, provides a critical reading of the texts, spaces, and discourses that have legitimized the postrevolutionary Mexican state, assured its continuance in power, and promoted the imposition of the capitalist model in Mexico beginning in the 1940s. I argue that in the novels and films analyzed in this book—Ensayo de un crimen (both the 1944 novel by Rodolfo Usigli and Luis Buñuel’s 1955 film adaptation), Juan Bustillo Oro’s El hombre sin rostro (1950), Rafael Bernal’s El complot mongol (1969), Carlos Fuentes’s La cabeza de la hidra (1978), Paco Ignacio Taibo II’s Cosa fácil (1977), Élmer Mendoza ’s Un asesino solitario (1999), and Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Amores perros (2000)—assassination and murder are acts that simultaneously delineate and transcend the symbolic boundaries of the nation. Taking into account murder’s relationship with diverse artistic manifestations that both imagine and critique twentieth-century Mexico, and paraphrasing Thomas De Quincey, I propose that, along with political assassination, it be considered a (post)national art in postrevolutionary Mexico.1 TheMexicanCrimeGenreandtheCritics Mexican crime fiction is a hybrid tradition insofar as it consists of all three variations of murder writing as identified by Carl D. Malmgren: the classic mystery novel (also known as the “whodunit”); detective fiction (also known as the “noir” or “hard-boiled” novel); and crime fiction, which is considered a revisionary reading of the other two forms that calls into question traditional notions of agency and the self (Malmgren 8). In Mexico, these subgenres overlap and form hybrids that at the same time remake other genres. For example, Ensayo de un crimen reworks the conventions of mystery fiction by narrating a story from the point of view of the murderer rather than from that of the detective . Although the detective’s search for the murderer does figure into Introduction 3 the plot, it only becomes prominent at...