Carlos Monsiváis (1938 – 2010) was one of Mexico's most influential writers and cultural critics, right up there with Octavio Paz and Carlos Fuentes. Although outside of Mexico he is not as well known, he was a prolific writer who, in the words of his English-language translator, John Kraniauskas, "transformed conventional journalism, literature and culture by opening up these fields to new—perhaps more 'ordinary'—objects, desire and concerns." Among those "ordinary concerns" were popular Mexican film stars, pachuco counterculture, the Mexican crime pages, Mexico City's "funky dives," and Mexican romantic songs. "Imposible comprender a México [it is impossible to understand Mexico] sin Carlos Monsiváis," was the headline of his obituary on the day Monsiváis died.
In his endeavor to examine Mexican culture in all its diversity, Monsiváis—who once likened himself to a cross between Albert Camus and Ringo Starr—demonstrated "a constant and steady sympathy and solidarity for the poorest and most marginalized sectors of Mexican society, and a huge appreciation for their strategies of survival," says Kraniauskas in his erudite and helpful introduction to Mexican Postcards, a collection of Monsiváis's essays.
Pachucos (zoot-suiters) *
Monsiváis was born into a Protestant family. "Already from early childhood," writes Kraniauskas, "his relationship to dominant Mexican society and culture was oblique… slightly off-centre." He studied economics, philosophy and literature at UNAM. Before he was 20, Monsiváis was already collaborating with the editors of some of the country's most important cultural journals. A great fan of the counter-culture movement of the 1960s, he was particularly attracted to Anglo-American culture, including, new journalism and rock music. He was, says Kraniauskas, "looking to be 'modern' according to the newest codes—and he found much of what he was looking for."
During the sixties, Monsiváis was a fellow at the Mexican Writers Center and at the Center for International Studies at Harvard. "His universal curiosity, his effective writing and his ability to synthesize allowed him to unravel the fundamental aspects of Mexican cultural and political life," the writer of his obituary in Milenio wrote. From the late 60s until his death, Monsiváis— "a mere reader" (un simple lector), he called himself—turned out scores of chronicles, essays, biographies and anthologies. An omnipresent public intellectual, he is also considered to be the co-founder of Mexico's LGBTQ movement.
The pieces collected in Mexican Postcards were originally published as articles in Mexican journals or as chapters in one of Monsiváis's many books. The earliest essay in the anthology dates from 1977; the latest from 1995. These wide-ranging, erudite, and hip pieces belong to an "in-between" genre, somewhere between essay and chronicle, and are characterized by a sense of fun (relajo), what Kraniausas describes as "an ironic distance filled with humour."
The collection kicks off with a long piece—"Mexico 1890-1976: High Contrast, Still Life," which originally appeared in Monsiváis's book Amor perdido. The essay, a primer for anyone interested in Mexico's topsy-turvy twentieth-century history, begins with the "stuccoed rigidity" of Porfirio Diaz's dictatorship and takes us up to the waning days of Liberalism.
About the many Mexican dissidents who, since the Díaz regime, have fought for democracy, socialism or alternative lifestyles, Monsiváis writes that the spaces relegated to them have been—hang on to your hat!—"prisons, common graves, tolerance, silence, negation, clandestinity, ridicule by the mass media, complaints of conspiracies, scams, funeral elegies, posthumous defamation, the ghetto, the endless succession of ghettos, confinement… It has never really been admitted that the reservations into which the dissidents are crammed both make possible and extend that minimal democratic space the rest of us inhabit."
Stuccoed Rigidity - Porfirio Díaz *
That's a typical Monsiváis passage. At its best, his prose is sharp, muscular, hard-hitting, and exhilarating; but some may find it hard work getting through one of his paragraphs. The essay ends with a sobering—and, yes, exhausting—final sentence: "And when an unspoken deal is believed to have been struck between complaint and the minimal spaces of freedom available, when the looming economic crisis hit, and the devaluations follow, and what is left of the dream evaporates, collective misery is flaunted as the extension of progress: to whom do you direct your trust when everything is for sale?" Some would argue that the Mexican political and economic landscape has changed for the better in the almost fifty years since that essay was written. But progress at whatever cost—human and environmental—still seems to be the name of the game in Mexico, as elsewhere on this planet.
Throughout the essays in Mexican Postcards, Monsiváis casts a gimlet eye on all classes—the wealthy power-holders, the middle class ("apathetic when it comes to political rights"), and the marginalized. Of the latter, he writes, "Mexican racism disdains the majority of the nation's population, literally throwing in their faces their lack of valued attributes, while praising the sublime physique of minorities, and brutally extirpating any dream nacos [the lower classes] may have in front of the mirror."
Other essays tackle Mexico City (a "post-apocalyptic city," he calls it); the cult of the Virgin of Guadalupe, in whom Monsiváis finds "the experience of marginality and suffering that are concealed by the pride in being Mexican"; and the dance venues of the youth subculture ("passionate, authentic, earthy, smelly, soulful").
Monsiváis' essay on Juan Rulfo, the author of two classics of Mexican literature, is superb. He asserts that the brilliance of Rulfo's novel Pedro Páramo is its "sharp combination of poetry and realism. Without intending to denounce, Pedro Páramo reveals processes of injustice and dispossession, the ways in which the possession of wealth and money translates into sovereignty over lives and dignity."
His essay on Dolores del Río, "The Face as Institution," is a lesson in the phenomenon of the Screen Goddess. "She is the Latino face of Hollywood, and this implies both devotion and sacrifice, the never-ending self-consciousness of a face forever under surveillance." While Monsiváis doesn't make the comparison (was it too obvious?), Dolores del Río was another talented actress who, like Marilyn Monroe, was relegated to "decorative parts and plots that centered on her physique." A "self-parody," he says. She was "the incomparable creature of melodrama, a genre that makes no concessions to real beings or situations." Also like Monroe, del Río also made some wonderful movies, including Doña Perfecta, "the nearest she comes to working with a total lack of conventional constraints." In other pictures, like the American-made The Fugitive, an adaptation of Graham Greene's The Power and the Glory, she becomes "almost a devotional image," bearing witness "to the years in which the Star was a prolongation of the Madonna."
Dolores Del Río (1932) *
In addition to the del Río essay, Mexican Postcards includes an essay on another legendary Mexican film star, Cantinflas. With his "speeded-up body," Cantinflas was a "happy combination of verbal incoherence and bodily coherence." His style, writes Monsiváis, "perfects and endows nonsense (the failure of eloquence) with humor. The poor applaud in him what is close and familiar to them and, whether they realize it or not, become enthusiastic about a not-so-very-strange fact: the festive and vindictive representation of poverty." In the 1940s, this Son of the People became "synonymous with the poor Mexican, representative and defender of the meek." Beyond his histrionics, it was Cantinflas's social defiance, his poverty, and "the wild romantic passion of the dispossessed" that made it easy for fans of the peladito to see him as the Mexican Charlie Chaplin.
Cantinflas *
In his essay "Bolero: A History," Monsiváis looks at the phenomenon of melodramatic Mexican love songs and their "abstract but warmly felt adoration of women," "mythologies of passionate frenzy," and "declamation of collective rapture." (Monsiváis could sure turn a phrase!) Here, too, he finds occasion for social critique: "The most popular images [in romantic songs] mask a harsh and voracious system that oppresses women by thinking of them as purely ethereal beings."
The alternative face of this conventional and oppressive sentimentalism, at least at the beginning of his career, was Agustín Lara, who, during the 1930s, had no rival as a composer and recording star of romantic songs. His melodies and poetry, Monsiváis writes, "express a transitional sentimentality, between Porfirian mentalité and the 'moral relativism' of post-Revolution." (Check out, for example, a recording of Lara singing his own "Noche de Ronda" on YouTube.) In what has got to be my favorite Monsiváis sentence (maybe because it's short!), he writes: "The taste for the romantic passes through [Lara], because he defines that wild universe that knows no verbal frontiers, the logic of delirium."
Monsiváis emphasizes the "audacity" of Lara's songs, which more than once celebrated the love of the prostitute. "The fervour that once canonized the bride, Lara now focuses on those women who could not even be named, and deposits it at their feet."
Agustín Lara *
Over the course of these twelve essays, Monsiváis's preoccupation with Mexican melodrama surfaces again and again. "Mexico cannot be understood if you do not know why the actress Sara García sheds a tear in silence, if you do not accept that social life is the martyrdom that each family passes through before its happy end." For him the power of melodrama depended on "the partial transference into private life of religious sentiment."
A few months before he died, Monsiváis published Apocalipstick, in which he wrote about Mexico City as una asamblea de lugares, a congeries of places. His intelligent awareness of both the unbridled fun and abject catastrophe of modern Mexican life is what makes Monsiváis so worth reading. He was utterly opposed to human degradation, a champion for "opening up spaces for humanism and social justice," what in another essay he called "the equal distribution of hope."
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Philip Gambone, a retired high school English teacher, also taught creative and expository writing at Harvard for twenty-eight years. He is the author of five books, most recently As Far As I Can Tell: Finding My Father in World War II, which was named one of the Best Books of 2020 by the Boston Globe. His new collection of short stories, Zigzag, will be published in October.
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