Project overview

 

My mapping project will plot the sites that are visited and frequented by characters in key Mexico City novels. The explosive production of novels that attempt to represent the complexity of the Mexican capital in the wake of Carlos Fuentes’ La región más transparente (1958) offers a variety of workable texts. I will begin by mapping the trajectory of two short novels, Jose Emilio Pacheco’s Las batallas en el desierto, and Gustavo Sainz’s Gazapo. Pacheco’s piece is written as a memoir of youth in which complex party politics and economic reforms of the 1950’s are perceived through the social signification of colonias along the city’s central thoroughfare, the Paseo de la Reforma. In Gazapo, the narrator, also an adolescent, draws maps and marks points of encounter with friends, family, and rivals along Insurgentes, another main artery of the city. In both of these novels, the sites of encounter are often monumental spaces for which the character is forming a counternarrative that addresses the deterioration of patriarchal values and social structures. My maps will indicate points along narrated trajectories—and there are many in these novels—in which the character articulates a de-monumentalizing statement. Those points will juxtapose such passages with more official historical background on the plotted site, or with passages from other novels that describe an encounter on the same site. Since Las batallas and Gazapo radiate from the primary axes of Reforma and Insurgentes, they can become the basis of intertextual mappings of other urban novel.

 

The mapping of character trajectories connects with my research on flâneur identity in Mexico City. As a literary construct, the flâneur, an urban wanderer and people-watcher, was imported from French prose poetry and essay, paticularly from the work of Charles Baudelaire. Walter Benjamin later proposes the flâneur as a social agent in essays on Baudelaire, and in his notes on his own experience of Berlin and Paris. In Mexico, the flâneur begins as an emulation, a part of the francophile tradition that emerged in the wake of the Napoleonic occupation. The modernist Francisco Zarco is the first known instance of an author self-identifying as a flâneur. In his essay “Los transeuntes”, Zarco posits himself as a roving street persona charged with the task of witnessing paradigmatic urban dynamics with a syntagmatic gaze, that is, he identifies and observes social strata by assigning them to individuals passing him by in the plaza. In this way, the flâneur engages the phenomenology of the cityscape, seeks a schema for it, but never surrenders the immediate, contingent experience as his main mode of inquiry. This urban practice is also readily found in the characters and narrators of Mexico City novels.

             

There is a certain arrogance attached to the original flâneur identity. Only the flâneur can observe the ideosyncracies and deficiencies of various demographic sectors in the plazas and streets, whether it be social privilege or unjust misery. Only the flâneur’s gaze reflects on how the urban pastiche reveals the flaws and challenges of its society. In my research, I have yet to access a text where a flâneur invites another flâneur along for a stroll, or in which a flâneur recognizes a colleague on the street (although I would be pleased to come across such a text). However, as transformations of the flâneur emerge, novels such as Pacheco’s and Sainz’s begin to show signs of fluidity in who does flânerie, how they do it. The emergence of acts of flânerie by marginalized voices, and the identification of the street as a contested space during the Student Movement of 1968 transform the rarified pastime of flânerie into a form of social action. As I proceed with the proposed character trajectories, I envision producing maps of alternative forms of flânerie practiced by protagonists of variable gender, race, and sexual identifications.