Carlos Monsivais: Culture and Chronicle in Contemporary Mexico (review)

Among the many observers of Mexican culture today, Carlos Monsiváis reigns supreme. A prolific writer in the tradition of Mexico City chronicler Salvador Novo, he came of age during the Latin American literary boom of the 1960s and 1970s. Beginning with his landmark book on the 1968 student movement, Días de guardar (1970), he has since authored four essential works on twentieth-century Mexico and coauthored or edited several other volumes, while churning out what seems like a nearly countless number of essays, articles, and newspaper columns.

Along with his colleague Elena Poniatowska, Monsiváis pioneered a new postmodern literary genre—the crónica—built upon the foundations of writers such as Bernal Díaz. This genre incorporates a variety of popular cultural strategies and subjects while simultaneously drawing upon the influential power of electronic media to reflect Mexico's turbulent contemporary times and give voice to civil society's continuing struggle for democracy. Throughout this remarkable and still-evolving career, he has crafted a public identity of carnival trickster who self- consciously and cleverly seeks to empower his readers. In the process, Monsiváis has established himself as a visionary who, through the power of language, aims to lead Mexico toward a more promising future.

Egan's in-depth study argues for a "poetics" of the crónica and a recognition of the genre as part of the literary canon currently under reconstruction. "Outside Mexico," she writes, "the chronicle remains a vast underground literature whose study will continue to be limited or distorted if more university-trained readers do not take a critical look at the way this narrativized journalism nimbly captures the unique character of socioeconomic and cultural realities in Mexico and elsewhere" (p. 235). Taking this somewhat daunting challenge to heart, Egan's work offers readers an accessible entry into the world of contemporary Mexican journalism, as well as a critical treatment linking each of Monsiváis's books to what she sees as the essential meanings of his artistic oeuvre.

The first part of the book discusses Monsiváis in the context of contemporary social and literary history. Seeing the crónica as a hybrid that combines "both the 'high' culture of Eurocentric literature and the 'low' culture of American mass media," Egan painstakingly deconstructs the writer's work while situating Monsiváis in relation to past debates on New Journalism and recent postmodern critical analysis (pp. xvii-xviii). Declaring that her goal is to legitimate Monsiváis as an "author" (and not just a journalist) in the eyes of the literary establishment, Egan's critique is primarily formal in its approach.

Identifying Monsiváis as a writer largely focused on urban popular culture at odds with an "official" national culture constructed in the interest of state legitimacy, Egan is intent on "cracking the baroquely Bakhtinian code of Monsiváis's texts." She discerns several central themes in his work, including modernization, the economy, politics and society, history, mass culture, sexuality, and language. From this she breaks down the vast category of "popular culture" into more specific "Monsiváisian" subgenres such as melodrama, kitsch, "camp" culture, "pop" culture, rural culture, and the aesthetic of poverty. Egan considers how Monsiváis comments on the changing cultural politics of contemporary Mexican society through shifting narrative strategies: the masterful blending of oral and written idioms, playing devil's advocate or carnival "fool," reporter at work, and so on. Whether contemplating his vivid accounts of the student movement and counterculture, various early-twentieth-century entertainment figures such as Agustín Lara or Celia Montalván, or heroic individuals engaged in rescue efforts following the 1985 Mexico City earthquake, Egan offers an unprecedented, comprehensive literary analysis of Monsiváis. While she sometimes clouds her discussion with academic jargon and literary list making (which, admittedly, may be necessary given...