Utopian Dreams, Apocalyptic Nightmares: Globilization in Recent Mexican and Chicano Narrative

Introduction

 Introduction Utopian Dreams, Apocalyptic Nightmares: Rewriting Mexican History in the Times of NAFTA Who controls the present, controls the past Who controls the past, controls the future George Orwell Nineteen Eighty-Four These words from George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (949) contemplating the importance of history and its impact on the future reflect a critical paradigm for contemporary Latin American and US Latino writers as they confront the social and political changes accompanying rapid modernization and globalization. Through the depiction of a desolate future, Nineteen Eighty-Four inspires a re-examination of the implications of the manipulation of history by a dictatorial state interested in advancing technology and industrialization at any cost, thus revealing the perils and contradictions of modernity. As the epigraph from Orwell suggests, control over the interpretation of history can be a key instrument for legitimizing the state and its projects. Like Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (932) and Ray Bradbury’s later Fahrenheit 451 (953), Orwell’s 949 masterpiece suggests the potential of memory as a form of cultural resistance to a world devoid of individual identity in which citizens are overwhelmed by the automatized images disseminated by an overarching system of mass media. Just as European novelists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries depicted the dystopian consequences of the industrial revolution, Mexican and Chicano writers at the turn of the millennium employ science fiction techniques to engage the questions of industrial development, urbanization, and environmental damage brought to the foreground by the signing of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 992, 2 Introduction coincidentally the same year as the quincentenary of the initial encounter between Europe and the Americas. The apocalyptic futures portrayed in science fiction works like those of Huxley, Orwell, and Bradbury stress the alienation of the individual in a world beset by conformity and consumerism . Latin American and US Latino authors also employ apocalyptic motifs to highlight the homogenizing effects of globalization and concomitant marginalization of difference. Because Latin America’s official history legitimizes projects of development that erase indigenous peoples, women, and nature from the discourse of modernity, presenting them as merely the backdrop of efforts toward progress, contemporary writers excavate the past in order to revisit some of the discourses that generated this marginalization. It is through this re-examination of history and, in particular, the history of the colonial encounter , that Mexican and Chicano novelists of the late 980s and 990s establish a connection between the past, present, and future consequences of the material and human exploitation conducted in the name of economic progress and industrial development. Europe’s problematic encounter with the Americas fueled the imagination of sixteenth-century explorers and thinkers, giving birth to the concept of the modern literary utopia that envisioned the New World as the earthly paradise. Paradoxically, the encounter with the Amerindians contributed to the emergence of the Western notion of modernity, which in the context of Latin American societies led to a cultural homogenization that excluded the Other from participating in the creation of the new societies. Supremacy over the recently conquered peoples of America became the foundation of modernity, an enterprise defined in terms of control over native peoples, women, and nature. Since the early exploration of the New World, America has been construed as different from Europe and specifically “otherized” in exotic and feminine terms. In order to facilitate their subordination to colonial rule, the Europeans feminized and “otherized” the Amerindians either as barbaric cannibals or noble savages who presumably lacked the intellectual depth to govern themselves or others. Following independence, the founding fathers of the new Latin American nations continued to consider women and native peoples as closer to nature. These 3 Introduction strategies of domination thus converged in the colonies and later in the independent republics, forming a base for the inequities of contemporary societies. Following the colonization of the Americas, the Industrial Revolution brought a change of perspective regarding the location of utopia. In the Golden Age, utopia was imagined as a pastoral Arcadia or the biblical Garden of Eden, a natural paradise from which mankind was expelled. With the dawn of industrial capitalism, nature came to be considered as an endless reserve of raw materials available for exploitation as science and technology were developed to meet the needs of Europe’s growing population. While in the early modern age the territories of the Americas...