DISPATCH FROM MEXICO
I'm just back from our first Book Club excursion to explore the literature of Mexico, and what a trip it was. Thank you to all of the intrepid readers who came along for the ride, and to anyone who missed this excursion: join us next time!
Given the premise of the club, we provided the focus country, and readers selected their own books. We very well could have ended up with as many different books as people, but it turns out that our group actually gravitated towards a handful of shared titles:
You Dreamed of Empires by Álvaro Enrigue
Pedro Páramo by Juan Rulfo
Reservoir Bitches by Dahlia de la Cerda
And – the wildcard – Hurricane Season by Fernanda Melchor*
I'd luckily read several of the books that others chose, because I cheated a tiny bit and read an advance of a book coming later this year:
Queen of Swords by Jazmina Barrera (November 2025)**
We talked widely and found a lot of nice connections across the books. History and heritage were a huge through-line (a book like Hurricane Season is indebted to the foundational Pedro Páramo, while You Dreamed of Empires literally re-writes the meeting of Cortés and Moctezuma). There were varied feminist responses to misogyny and femicide, from the Melchor's riveting account of a small-town murder to the many sharp-tongued voices of Reservoir Bitches. And language and translation provided so much ground for discussion: a few readers in our group also read in Spanish and provided some great insight into differences across translation, just as You Dreamed of Empires fictionalized those dynamics through the characters of two translators.
We're enthusiasts, not experts; this single meet-up can't do justice to the breadth of a country's literature! And there is so much to discover from Mexican writers: a twisty art crime caper, feminist horror, an elegiac reminiscence, lyrical poetry, a coming-of-age of female friendship, a suburban farce, or absurdist domestic comedy. Come and explore all of our Mexican books on the shelf or on our website.
Reading always fires my curiosity, and al of this got me thinking about cross-cultural exchange, indigeneity, and feminism. So along these lines, I'm sharing below some readings, suggestions and songs for further exploration...
Magical Monolith: An Interview with Álvaro Enrigue in Rain Taxi
I don’t think that I write historical fiction at all. In this novel I worked with historical archives to generate literary fiction in the tradition of Latin American literature of the fantastic: Juan Rulfo, Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortázar, Juan José Arreola, just to name the best of them. And I don’t believe in the need to suspend credibility to read or write fiction—I think that is a 19th-century superstition.
499 - A documentary film that explores contemporary Mexico through the eyes of a conquistador who washes ashore nearly 500 years later
La Realidad Méxicana: An Interview with Fernanda Melchor by her translator Sophie Hughes in The Southwest Review
...since I was no Truman Capote anyway, and there was no guarantee that interviewing the real criminals could actually help me to truly understand why they killed their victim. So I thought I could investigate those deepest motives through fiction. What’s left from that intention was the way I created the novel, a bit like a literary detective: all I knew was somebody was killed and somebody else had done it, and I just imagined the rest of the story all the way up to the beginning.
And in this interview from The Nation, I discovered this interesting link between Melchor's books and the heritage of conquest.
I owe so much to Veracruz. [...] When Cortés first arrived to the shores of Veracruz, he was supposed to return to Cuba and report on what he’d found. But he decided, instead, to found a base there from which to undertake the conquest of this empire he’d been hearing about. Everything good, and everything bad, that has come into Mexico—and the American continent—first arrived in Veracruz. It’s a puerto [port] and a puerta [door].
Carlos CGH - A rapper with indigenous roots trying to preserve Triquí culture and language through his music.
Juan Rulfo's Pedro Páramo Reconsidered in On the Seawall
Pedro Páramo is not an easy book, but a relentlessly compelling one. I remember reading it in one day as García Márquez had done before embarking on the writing of One Hundred Years of Solitude, then rereading it repeatedly for years after though I never managed to memorize it as he had done. García Márquez rightly calls Pedro Páramo “a poetic work of the highest order.”
The iconic Lila Downs, who draws from her Mixtec heritage as well as the diversity of Mexican folk music.
And a parting track for those of you who read You Dreamed of Empires ...
* (Ed. a very upsetting book that I happen to really love, but hesitated to order for the store. So many people connected with it, that I now feel I have encouragement to stock it!)
**(Ed. Barrera's forthcoming book is an inventive, fragmented biography of the Mexican author Elena Garro, a writer, activist, dancer, political exile, and wife to Nobel Laureate Octavio Paz. One of Garro's most famous short stories follows a Mexican socialite who is pulled back-and-forth through time between her present-day and the moment of conquest -- an interesting pairing with Enrigue's book, to be sure! It will be included in the first English translation of Elena Garro's story collection, The Week of Colors, also coming in November.)