Crossbreeding and creolization
In South America, literature certainly did not wait for the arrival of the Conquistadors to begin to be written, as witnessed by the work of Nezahualcóyotl, a strange poetry that sings of God as much as of the destiny of Man, and which can be discovered in French by Arfuyen. The "Famished Coyote", son of the king of Texcoco, was born in the year Un-Lapin, that is to say in 1402 according to our calendar, a little more than a hundred years before the Spaniards crossed the ocean and decided to take over the territory. This colonization has a specificity, very quickly it is adorned with a will of miscegenation. La Malinche, who was renamed Doña Marina, has remained the symbol of this ambiguity which will mark the destiny of the country. This woman, of Nahua origin, was given to a colonist, Hernán Cortès, of whom she had a son. Her role was not limited to motherhood, however, as she served as an interpreter - quickly adding Spanish to the Nahuatl and Yucatecan languages she already mastered - and soon as an advisor to the colonists. Alternately seen as a traitor or, on the contrary, as a negotiator who knew how to preserve her people, she is also the mother of a people in the making and the translator, that is to say, the one thanks to whom the languages mix and the process of creolization is pressed forward. With her various nicknames, she is now a mythical character and will not 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 a very recent technique, printing, which was seen as a means of providing the necessary tools for the conversion of the native peoples. Mexico City thus became the first city in the Americas where a book went to press in 1539. Although no copy of this inaugural edition has survived, it is said that it was certainly the Celestial Scale of Saint John Climacus. 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 wrote 110 chapters on the country's past and conquest, or Fernando de Alva Cortés Ixtlilxóchitl, who was interested in the Toltec people, among many other things. Cultivating memory does not prevent the production of a literary work, and it is this symbiosis that Antonio de Saavedra Guzmàn achieved with El Peregrino Indiano, which had the honour of being the first poem composed in New Spain to be printed in Madrid (1559). Finally, fiction also quickly became part of the landscape - cultural life was very rich - as evidenced by Juan Ruiz de Alarcón, born in Real de Taxco in October 1581, whose ambition was to devote himself to his passion for the theatre, he was born in Real de Taxco in October 1581, and his ambition was to devote himself to his passion for the theatre, even if it meant being mocked by his peers for his appearance, or Juana Inés de la Cruz, who was born in the middle of the seventeenth century and decided to turn away from the world by joining the orders so that she could devote herself to study and poetry in complete peace.Independence
Nevertheless, during the eighteenth century, production was strongly influenced by the peninsula, and it was not until the beginning of the nineteenth century that what was to become a national literature began to take 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 deposed magistrate, José Joaquín Fernández de Lizardi (1776-1827) took up journalism to support his family. It is difficult to interpret his political pirouettes retroactively, but it must be conceded that the era was very complex and did not simplify the publication of his work, which he had chosen to publish in serial form from 1816. If he certainly suspected that the publication would be quickly interrupted by censorship - he did not dare to address the issue of slavery? -he probably did not guess that the last 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 search of a job that would allow him to earn a living. Bordering on the picaresque, this novel was a great success and has been reprinted ever since. Although it begins with the signing of the Act of Independence in 1822, the 19th century was not a peaceful one. Wars followed one another, against Spain, which attempted a final reconquest, then against the United States, which annexed Texas, and finally against France for financial reasons. When Porfirio Díaz arrived in 1884, the country was at the end of its tether, and his presidency ended with a revolution that began in 1910 and lasted for ten years. In a word, the century was hardly conducive to literature, but it did have one important work: 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 such as Hilarión Frías y Soto (1831-1905) and Pantaleón Tovar (1828-1876) questioned their national identity, thereby placing the figure of the mestizo 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 connections with political circles, such as 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 writing novellas to his responsibilities as a deputy, as did Ignacio Manuel Altamirano (1834-1893). Romanticism, introduced late in Mexico, was combined with realism and became a study 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 much 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, who worked as a surgeon. However, it was literature that stirred his inner world from his earliest youth, and he wrote reviews as well as travel notes, poems and short stories, which were published in a collection in 1883 under the title El Duque. Nájera used several pseudonyms in his journalistic career, but he had a real admiration for European authors and dreamed of combining the inspiration of both continents in a single breath. At the end of his short life, which ended after an illness in 1895, his body was deposited in the French Pantheon in his native city. His companion, 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, but also biographies and short stories. The Revista Azul did not survive the year 1896, when the newspaper that hosted it disappeared, but in two years it published the texts of a hundred writers and just as many experiments, to which were added translations of French authors. A second magazine took over from 1898 to 1903, La Revista Moderna
, which welcomed many of the innovative writers of the day, including Luis Gonzaga Urbina, a poet of great stature 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.Modernism was dying out while the fire of the revolution was burning, and this gave rise to a new current that bore his name and was realized in the publication of realist novels fed by journalism. This quasi-photographic approach is perfectly embodied in Mariano Azuela's Ceux d'en bas (Los de abajo, 1915), slices of life that can be devoured, published by L'Herne, but also in the work of Alfonso Reyes Ochoa or 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 had his play El Gesticulador censored in 1938. That same year, a periodical, Taller, was created, bringing together writers who questioned social issues. This new generation of writers contrasted with the previous generation, the Contemporáneos, published in the eponymous magazine founded in 1928, who were mainly concerned with stylistic issues. Very quickly a name emerged, that of Octavio Paz. History does not yet know it, but the young man, born in Mexico City in 1914, was to become a Nobel Prize winner in literature in 1990, an award that seems entirely justified in view of the impact that his poetry, collected under the title Freedom of the Word, and his essay, The Labyrinth of Solitude
, had in the 1950s. His work was multi-faceted and never ceased to explore many poetic avenues. As for the man himself, he remained faithful to his convictions and became involved in politics. For the time being, the middle of the 20th century saw two other important publications, Al filo del agua(Tomorrow's Storm) by Augustín Yáñez in 1947, an almost joyful novel that portrays 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 "indigenous" movement but raise the more global question of the definition of a national identity, and are tinged with a certain disillusionment - augur the "Boom" of the 1960s, that explosion of talent of which Carlos Fuentes (1928-2012) was a leading figure in Mexico. His novels, both critical and political, quickly gained him international recognition and many of them have been translated into French by Gallimard(The Glass Border, The Happiness of Families, The Instinct of Inez, etc.). In 1966, José Agustín published De Perfil(Mexico City, noon minus five, published by La Différence) and became the instigator of a counter-culture movement 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 leave behind their purely Mexican roots and tackle more universal issues.
