Crossbreeding and creolization
In South America, literature certainly didn't wait for the arrival of the Conquistadors before it began to be written, as witnessed by the work of Nezahualcóyotl, a strange poetry that sings to God as much as to the destiny of Man, and is now available in French from Editions Arfuyen. The "Famished Coyote", son of the king of Texcoco, was born in the year Un-Lapin, 1402 according to our calendar, a little over a hundred years before the Spaniards crossed the ocean and decided to take over the territory. This colonization was unique in that it very quickly became adorned with a desire for crossbreeding. La Malinche, who was renamed Doña Marina, has remained the symbol of this ambiguity, which will leave its mark on the country's destiny. This woman of Nahua origin was given to a colonist, Hernán Cortès, and had a son. Her role was not limited to motherhood, however, as she served as interpreter - quickly adding Spanish to the Nahuatl and Yucatecan languages she already mastered - and soon as advisor to the colonists. Alternately regarded as a traitor or, on the contrary, as a negotiator who knew how to preserve her people, she was also the mother of a people in the making and the translator, i.e. the one who helped languages to mingle and the process of creolization to gain momentum. Endowed with a variety of nicknames, she is now a mythical figure who will never cease to resurface in the popular imagination.
For the time being, however, cultural assimilation remained a priority, at least for the Church, which encouraged the introduction of the printing press, a very recent technique, as a means of providing the tools needed for the conversion of native peoples. Mexico City thus became the first city in the Americas to print a book as early as 1539. Although no copy of this inaugural edition has survived, it is said to have been L'Échelle céleste by Saint Jean Climaque. Nevertheless, it was the New World that inspired the first original works, chronicles written, for example, by Fernando Alvarado Tezozómoc, grandson of an Aztec emperor, who penned 110 chapters on the country's past and conquest, or Fernando de Alva Cortés Ixtlilxóchitl, who took an interest in the Toltec people, among many other things. Cultivating memory in no way prevents the production of a literary work, and Antonio de Saavedra Guzmàn achieved this symbiosis with El Peregrino Indiano, which had the honour of being the first poem composed in New Spain to be printed in Madrid (1559). Last but not least, fiction was also very much a part of the landscape - cultural life was very rich indeed - as demonstrated by Juan Ruiz de Alarcón, born in Real de Taxco in October 1581, whose ambition was to devote himself to his passion for theater, or Juana Inés de la Cruz, born in the middle of the 17th century, who decided to turn her back on the world by joining the orders, so that she could devote herself to study and poetry.
Independence
Nevertheless, during the 18th century, production remained strongly influenced by the peninsula, and it was not until the early 19th century that what was to become a truly national literature took shape. In any case, its appearance coincided with the War of Independence (1810-1821) and the publication of a novel that is considered the first written in Latin America. Undoubtedly, the two are linked. A disgraced magistrate, José Joaquín Fernández de Lizardi (1776-1827) took up journalism to support his family. It's tricky to interpret his political pirouettes retroactively, but we have to concede that the era was highly complex, and in no way simplified the publication of his work, which he had chosen to serialize as early as 1816. While he was certainly aware that publication would soon be interrupted by censorship - he didn't dare broach the subject of slavery - he had no doubt that his work would be published as a serial -he may not have guessed that the final episodes would not be delivered to readers until 1831, four years after his death. In El Periquillo Sarniento, he portrays the wanderings of Pedro Sarmiento in pursuit of a job that would enable him to earn a living. Bordering on the picaresque, this novel won over the masses and has been reprinted ever since.
Although it begins with the signing of the Act of Independence in 1822, the 19th century is far from peaceful, with one war after another, first against Spain, which is attempting a final reconquest, then against the United States, which is annexing Texas, and finally against France for financial reasons. By the time Porfirio Díaz took office in 1884, the country was on its last legs, and his presidency ended with a revolution that began in 1910 and lasted ten years. In a word, the century was hardly conducive to literature, but it did have one important work to its credit: Los Mexicanos pintados pos sí mismos. This collective work, published in 1854 and 1855, was inspired by what had been done elsewhere in Europe: authors - including Hilarión Frías y Soto (1831-1905) and Pantaleón Tovar (1828-1876) - questioned their national identity, thereby putting the figure of the mestizo back at the heart of the debate. When the authors were not religious, such as Anastasio Maria de Ocha y Acuña, whose Poesías de un Mexicano appeared in New York in 1828, they had political connections, like the playwright and diplomat Manuel Eduardo de Gorostiza (1789-1851), the particularly prolific journalist and writer Manuel Payno Flores, or Florencio Maria de El Castillo (1828-1863), who added novellas to his responsibilities as a member of parliament, as did Ignacio Manuel Altamirano (1834-1893). Romanticism, introduced late in Mexico, was combined with realism and readily became studies of manners or historical novels, such as those written by Justo Sierra O'Reilly (1814-1861) or Vicente Riva Palacio (1832-1896). But the new century was to prove far more innovative.
Modernism and revolution
In 1894, two men decided to found a magazine, La Revista Azul, which was to revolutionize Mexican literature and become the mouthpiece of a new trend, modernism. The first was Manuel Gutiérrez Nájera, born in Mexico City in 1859 and a surgeon in civilian life. However, it was literature that stirred his inner world from an early age, and he wrote reviews, travel notes, poems and short stories, which were published in a collection in 1883 under the title El Duque. Using several pseudonyms in his journalistic career, Nájera was a true admirer of European authors, and dreamed of combining the inspiration of both continents in a single breath. At the end of his short life, which ended as a result of illness in 1895, his body was deposited in the French Pantheon in his home town. His colleague, Carlos Diaz Dufoo (1861-1941), was born in Veracruz but grew up in Spain. On his return to Mexico, he devoted himself to journalism and his own works: plays, essays, biographies and short stories. La Revista Azul didn't survive the year 1896, when the newspaper that hosted it disappeared, but in two years it published texts by around a hundred writers and just as many experiments, as well as translations by French authors. From 1898 to 1903, a second magazine took over, La Revista Moderna, whose pages welcomed a host of innovative writers of the day, including Luis Gonzaga Urbina, a major poet and future director of the National Library, José Juan Tablada, who excelled in the art of calligrams and symbolic metaphors, and Amado Nervo, who gave in to melancholy and his love of rhyme.
As modernism fades, the fire of revolution ignites, giving rise to a new trend that bears his name and is realized in the publication of realist novels nourished by journalism. This quasi-photographic approach is perfectly embodied in Mariano Azuela's Ceux d'en bas(Los de abajo, 1915), slices of life to be devoured, published by L'Herne, as well as in the work of Alfonso Reyes Ochoa and Martín Luis Guzmán(L'Ombre du Caudillo, published by Folio). While Rafael Felipe Muñoz (1899-1972) seized on the myth of the revolutionary Pancho Villa in the 1920s, Rodolfo Usigli Wainer's play El Gesticulador was censored in 1938. In the same year, a periodical, Taller, was created, bringing together writers who questioned social issues. This new generation of writers contrasted with their predecessors, the Contemporáneos published in the eponymous magazine founded in 1928, who were mainly concerned with stylistic issues. The name of Octavio Paz soon emerged. History does not yet know it, but this young man, born in Mexico City in 1914, is destined to win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990, an award that seems entirely justified in view of the resounding success in the 1950s of both his poetry, collected under the title Liberté sur parole, and his essay, Le Labyrinthe de la solitude. His work was multi-faceted and never ceased to explore many poetic avenues. As for the man himself, he remained true to his convictions and became involved in politics.
For the time being, the mid-twentieth century saw two other important publications: Augustín Yáñez's Al filo del agua(Tomorrow's Storm) in 1947, an almost joyful novel depicting the life of a small village, and Pedro Paramo (Folio editions) in 1955, thanks to which Juan Rulfo has been compared to William Faulkner. These new voices - which sometimes encompass the "indigenism" movement, but raise the more global question of defining a national identity, and are tinged with a certain disillusionment - augur well for the "Boom" of the 1960s, the explosion of talent for which Carlos Fuentes (1928-2012) was a leading figure in Mexico. His novels, both critical and political, quickly won him international recognition, and many have been translated into French by Gallimard(La Frontière de verre, Le Bonheur des familles, L'Instinct d'Inez, etc.). In 1966, José Agustín published De Perfil(Mexico noon minus five, published by La Différence) and became the instigator of a counter-culture undercurrent that did not hesitate to break the rules and use slang. Finally, in the 1990s, it was the work of Jorge Volpi - born in 1968 - that heralded the "Crack", the clear desire of a new generation of writers to break away from their purely Mexican roots and tackle more universal issues.
