Entre heroes, fantasmas y apocalípticos. Testigos y paisajes en la crónica mexicana by Anadeli Bencomo (review)

The visibility of the Latin American chronicle among literary scholars and the increased number of critical and theoretical studies that have appeared in the past ten years owe a great deal to the work of Anadeli Bencomo. Professor Bencomo’s first book, Voces y voceros de la megalópolis: la crónica periodístico- literaria en México (1968–1990) (2002), provided an introductory overview of the genre in Mexico and then focused on the chronicles of Elena Poniatowska, Carlos Monsiváis, and José Joaquín Blanco in separate chapters. The publication of the book coincided with and complemented Linda Egan’s monograph Carlos Monsiváis: Culture and Chronicle in Contemporary Mexico (2002) and the edited volume The Contemporary Mexican Chronicle: Theoretical Perspectives on the Liminal Genre by Ignacio Corona and Beth Jörgensen (2002). Her new book, as she states in her prologue, engages in a dialogue with the earlier title by bringing the study into the first decade of the twenty-first century and expanding the list of chroniclers to include not only Monsiváis (again the subject of a full chapter), but Rossana Reguillo, Sergio González Rodríguez, Alma Guillermoprieto, Luis Arturo Ramos, and Juan Villoro, as well as the Venezuelan journalist José Duque, whom she pairs with Reguillo as chroniclers of violence.

Chapter one, “Paseo por la crónica mexicana,” offers a panoramic view of the urban chronicle as a record of the transformations undergone by Mexico City in the twentieth century. Bencomo travels the geography of the capital from the Paseo de la Alameda, down Reforma, and into the suburban shopping malls and marginal residential areas to show how writers as diverse as Salvador Novo, Monsiváis, Elena Poniatowska, José Joaquín Blanco, and Roberto Vallarino have chronicled the processes of urbanization and migration, the growth of consumer society, civil discontent and protest, natural disaster, and the evolving nightmare of human misery in the capital. This concise and clearly organized chapter offers an excellent introduction to the chronicle of Mexico City and how its language has adapted to reflect ever-changing social conditions and cultural phenomena.

Given the vast size of Carlos Monsiváis’s corpus, Bencomo makes a wise choice in focusing on his 2005 book, No sin nosotros: Los días del terremoto 1985–2005, in her second chapter. This choice allows her to distinguish between the essay and the chronicle as two modes of representation of urban reality that Monsiváis deployed to different ends while treating a common theme. Bencomo draws upon existing definitions to show how his earthquake chronicle exemplifies the immediacy and urgency of reporting as events unfold before the writer’s eyes, while the essay form implies an act of reflection and interpretation that develops over time and takes a longer view that contextualizes and synthesizes the events of the past. In this chapter as in those that follow, the strengths are Bencomo’s close reading of selected texts and her discussion of the social and historical processes at play in Mexico at the time of producing the chronicles under study. The primary weakness is the lack of rigorous theorization of the genre, and the omission of pertinent references, such as Linda Egan’s 2002 article on Héctor Aguilar Camín and Monsiváis, “Play on Words: Chronicling the Essay,” published in the Corona and Jörgensen volume.

The representation of violence is an inescapable fact of contemporary Mexican journalism and chronicle writing. The third chapter examines texts by Rossana Reguillo and the Venezuelan writer José Duque to show ways in which the chronicle, when conceived as part of an anthropological project as in Reguillo’s Ciudadano N or as a product of investigative journalism in Duque’s Guerra nuestra, contributes to a more profound and complex understanding of the imaginary of violence in our societies than what is given in the “nota roja...