In 2023 I set myself the goal of reading more Mexican fiction. It’s one of the few resolutions I’ve made that actually proved useful. I read work by Fernanda Melchor, Valeria Luiselli, Juan Rulfo, and devoured all of Yuri Herrera’s novels. When 2024 arrived, I decided to keep the resolution going and started the year by reading Álvaro Enrigue’s newly published You Dreamed of Empires. I was captivated by Enrigue’s imagining of Tenoxtitlan, capital of the Aztec empire and the future site of Mexico City.
Then towards the end of 2024, a new novel by Yuri Herrera, Season of the Swamp, was published. I was struck by the unexpected parallels between Season of the Swamp and You Dreamed of Empires. Both novels focus on some of the most famous figures from Mexican history, but find small gaps in the historical record: Herrera looks at 18 months in the life of Benito Juárez, while Enrigue looks at a single day during the Spanish conquest of Mexico. Both novels offer rich evocations of fantastic and violent cities, and do so from the perspective of outsiders who are enthralled but also threatened by these cities.
Those surprise similarities could already have made for an interesting review, but there was another consideration (and complication) that felt very relevant. These novels came out in the last year of Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s presidency in Mexico. López Obrador also happens to be a big fan (and published author) of Mexican history, but he seems much more interested in grandiose histories, and on inserting himself into the narrative.
I kept telling myself that I absolutely didn’t have time to write something about this, especially as I wasn’t sure how it all fit together. Then I found a quote in another 2024 book on Mexico – Sovereignty and Extortion by anthropologist Claudio Lomnitz – that provided a bridge between what the novels were saying and what López Obrador was doing. I still didn’t have time to write an essay, but I couldn’t let the idea go.
Eventually I pitched the essay to Public Books, who published a previous essay on Fernanda Melchor’s fiction (unlike this new one, that previous essay fell together quickly, in the immigration queue at JFK airport). The Public Books team did a fantastic job of tightening up and fact checking my sprawling draft. The finished piece came out at the very end of July.
Philip Luke Johnson 