In a series of talks delivered at Harvard between 1992 and 1993, Italian critic Umberto Eco argued that the “main business” of literary interpretation consisted in outlining a text’s “model reader”: an imagined figure “whom the text not only foresees as a collaborator but also tries to create.”[1] It is in the trying, through the most varied literary strategies, that a novel creates meaning and produces a certain effect. Any other way in which a “reader’s attention is fixed,” be it a metaphor or a blank space or an epigraph, forcing one to look in this or that direction, is considered by Eco part of the “rules of the game.” It is from the close reading of these “instructions” provided by the text that the critic can grasp the work’s logic, what drives it, what it is about.[2]
América del Norte (2024), the first novel by Mexican writer Nicolás Medina Mora, is a book full of rules and some outright instructions. Its last pages, for example, include a “Note on facts,” wherein, after going through more than four hundred pages, “Readers interested in factual accounts of the historical and political issues discussed in this book are encouraged to consult the following bibliography” (445, emphasis added). A lengthy list follows, with recommendations on “Mexican History,” the “Virgen de Guadalupe,” and “Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel,” among others. Interestingly, at least one of the suggested readings (Walter Benjamin’s Notebooks from the Lost Briefcase) is apocryphal.
But the rules of this game are set much earlier. A book written in English with a Spanish title is imagining from the outset a particular reader; if not bilingual, at least bicurious. This model reader must also be very patient, for there is a long way to go before reaching the novel’s opening lines. First comes a dedication, then three epigraphs (which juxtapose Louis Althusser, Alfonso Reyes, and Heriberto Yépez; three wildly different dinner guests), a disclaimer (“All the characters in this novel—especially the real ones—are imaginary”), and finally a dramatis personae which takes up six pages, after which we have only arrived at the prologue.
América del Norte considers itself difficult terrain to navigate. The reader needs a cast of characters; the reader needs a list of further reading. The reader also needs a local, knowledgeable tour guide, and so we get “Your Correspondent,” the title with which the narrator, Sebastián Arteaga y Salazar (even the last name is hard!), presents himself. This recurring label appears every time the novel begins a new section (“In which Your Correspondent…”), where the reader is provided with a summary of things to come, for their convenience. This is an erudite, postmodern gesture, borrowed from Spain and Spanish America’s literary tradition of the fifteenth through seventeenth centuries, when writers such as Hernán Cortés and Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora (both of whom appear as characters in América del Norte), presented themselves as figures of the contact between worlds.
Back then it was the colony and the metropole. Today it is Mexico and the United States. Our Correspondent is a journalist by trade, and his “dispatches” come mainly from two very different places, Mexico City (his birthplace) and Iowa City (where he has recently enrolled in the nation’s preeminent writing program), spanning two years, May 2016 to July 2018. These, the novel suggests, are years of grave diplomatic danger and confusion: the election of Donald Trump decisively alters how and what the US thinks of Mexico. Sebastián, the son of a former Mexican diplomat in D.C., is Mexican born but US educated, speaks impeccable English and feels at home at a cantina. And so, he tries to mediate.
But on behalf of whom? The model reader constructed by this novel about a young writer navigating the waters of craft, alcoholism, romantic attachments, personal loss, and national estrangement is not, I suggest, a Mexican.[3] She knows already how a cantina looks on the inside, she knows the story of Moctezuma and the conquest. She knows the air in Mexico City is all dust and pollution; she knows better than to drink tap water. She knows the US immigration system is essentially broken, she knows what Mexicans are for some Americans, Trump or no Trump. She knows, most of all, what Sebastián tries intently to relay about his own country: that the Mexican elites he is a part of are (unsurprisingly!) out of touch not only with the people, but with the nation at large.[4]
When a Mexico City troubadour asks Sebastián if he’d like to hear any song, he replies with the title of an Argentinean track. “Sorry, boss,” replies the musician. “Don’t think I know the chords” (213). In another scene, our Correspondent walks the streets of La Roma and La Condesa, “for ten, twenty, thirty minutes before I was forced to admit I was lost. I took out my phone to look at Google Maps again but my American telecom company didn’t provide service in Mexico” (20). Instead, Sebastián knows “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” by heart, and when he downs his drinks in snow-bleak Iowa he is nostalgic for New York (“the place I know best”), not Mexico (42).
It is Iowa City, and the writing program in particular, which push Sebastián toward the mediator role. He wants to write on Nietzsche and nostalgia, but his colleagues and professors in the workshop want Mexico. Significantly, the writing sample he submitted for admittance to the program had been “a piece about food […] [t]his essay about carnitas I wrote […] Identity content, they called it” (91). How to Make Carnitas may have started as a joke, but ended up, in the most Nietzschean fashion, as destiny.
During a trip back in Mexico City, after turning off the TV, Sebastián ruminates:
The Americans had let me go to Yale because they wanted me to become a translator, a go-between. I was supposed to go back to the capital, leverage my last name into a position in the highest levels of government, and advocate for American interests. Instead, I held on to my visa as if for dear life. And now I’d given it away in hopes of becoming a writer. I lay down on the couch but couldn’t sleep. My earliest memories were of watching American films, coveting American toys. The band I formed with my high school friends had played covers of American songs. For better or worse I was a child of NAFTA. And then, as I lay in the reddish darkness of a city I barely knew, wondering what judgment awaited me as a foreigner in my own country, I realized I was talking to myself in English. (207–8)
This is the novel’s essential paragraph. It starts with a distance (“The Americans”), and ends, ominously, within. It first assumes that to “advocate for American interests” consists in government work (perhaps for biographical reasons: while Sebastián is in Iowa, his father is a Supreme Court Justice), and opposes it (through the image of “giving away” his visa) to the role of the writer. But then he talks about American films and songs: cultural products that are also, and one could say crucially, doing heavy political work in the years of NAFTA integration. What keeps Sebastián awake that night is the realization that he is advocating for his North American peers, that he feels like a foreigner even in his own father’s house, that he will end up doing with this novel a loftier version of the job of translating a carnitas recipe. He will write for the Americans. He will do so with some irony, and some criticism, but nothing extraordinary. He will find and summon other mediating figures of the past (enter Cortés, Sigüenza, José Vasconcelos, et al.) and he will try, following his love for Ezra Pound, to make it new.
It is significant that, before turning off the TV, Sebastián had been watching a news show where panicked Mexican commentators discussed the possibility of steep tariffs imposed on the country by the Trump administration, another in a series of political, commercial, and even military threats. This is what precedes the couch epiphany, in September 2017. Trump’s election had taken place while Sebastián was in Iowa, watching the results in a bar. Once the AP called the election for Trump, “[t]he room fell silent. Besides the affected diction of the talking heads and the occasional whimper, the only sound I could hear,” writes Sebastián, “was the blood pumping through my punch-drunk head” (72). The reaction from this verbose, witty narrator turns out to be primal, mute. It is bodily, uncontrollable, compelling. TV anchors are useless in a shipwreck. If the blood is louder, what does it want to say?
In 2015, Trump’s campaign had started with a definition of who the Mexicans were and what one should expect from them, particularly those in the United States: “They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.”[5] Hence the impulse, almost natural, to speak out. América del Norte attempts to be a lengthy, erudite response to this crude presentation. What Trump and his racist discourse created was a sense of urgency, a need to establish immediate contact with the gringos. Sebastián is not cut out for government work, but having been trained as a journalist (the mediating profession par excellence), he can become your Correspondent.
In a scene that takes place almost a decade prior, in “2007 or 2008,” when Sebastián’s father served as Mexico’s Attorney General, we see the Arteaga y Salazar family host a dinner for a “high-ranking US delegation.” There, young Sebastián is summoned “to join the dinner table, with instructions to ask intelligent questions.” The evening goes well, Sebastián writes: “the Americans were impressed. In their minds Mexico was a barely civilized place. They didn’t expect the Austro-Hungarians” (229), That is to say, the moneyed, cultivated Mexicans. The ones who quote Whitman and will guide them on their tours (literary or not) of old Mexico. This episode is important precisely because it prefigures what an older Sebastián will end up doing yet again, even if, somewhat tragically, he had left the country in no small part because of the burden this represented to him. Then and now he must perform a sort of intellectual competence, resignifying what Mexico means and who the Mexicans are in the eyes of their neighbors.
This ungrateful role, or so América del Norte suggests, is almost a family curse. The story of a nineteenth-century Arteaga y Salazar, Sebastián’s ancestor, bookends the novel. This man is sent undercover to Philadelphia to broker a peace deal with Mexico during the War of 1847. His somewhat unpatriotic compromise portends Sebastián’s efforts at mutual understanding, not in the diplomatic, cigar-room language of the nineteenth century, but in a form much-recognized and appreciated by the empire today: that of autofiction. This, Sebastián is told repeatedly in Iowa City, is what the US reader wants, what they understand.
The novel is written for them. They who need to be reminded twice that a novel is fiction; who need an orderly list of all those foreign-sounding names; who are perhaps in need of a crash course in Mexican history (conveniently provided by the readings itemized in the end); who must be told the story (yet again) of the great Mexican empire and its fall; who appreciate the brief dispatches and the forthright prose. And yet, there is a resistance, born out of the narrator’s resentment of having to do what history (national, literary, and even familial) pushes him to do. If you want a guide to Mexico City, I’ll give you one who gets lost; if you want a translator, I’ll give you a final line that can’t be read. The novel is full of “evil twins”: characters and their more or less successful, more or less transgressive mirror images. Sebastián wants to be both the American writer of pleasurable autofiction and the highbrow, “universal” essayist; both a “reporter,” humbly at the service of the reader, and an “insufferable pedant,” at the service of his whims (xv). In the face of this unsolvable contradiction, the novel becomes a form of compromise.
Notes:
[1] Umberto Eco, Six Walks in the Fictional Woods (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), 16, 9.
[2] Eco, Six Walks, 56, 10.
[3] América del Norte’s most obvious influences are not Mexican either. Sheila Heti’s How Should a Person Be? (2010) looms large: fragmentary, autofictional writing which resembles diary entries, a wonderful pretext to experiment with form and tone in the hopes that, by aggregation, it will become that great novel the authors were destined to write. Medina Mora’s work recalls, too, the lucid, politically inflected, I-was-once-a-high-school-debate-champion energy of Sally Rooney’s dialogue (as in 2017’s Conversations with Friends), and follows both thematically and tonally other relatively recent US Bildungsromane, such as Andrew Martin’s Early Work (2018), and Benjamin Kunkel’s Indecision (2005).
[4] Sebastián calls his kind of Mexican the Austro-Hungarians, a name that is meant to evoke both Old-World refinement and decadence, along with the country’s colonial past, contemporary racial politics, and long-standing oligarchy. The “Mexican elite scenes” are intended as self-aware and self-deprecating, with fast-talking characters surrounded by bodyguards and drenched in cynicism. “Such is the way of the world,” writes Sebastián in a typical passage, “the rich write novels; the poor just die” (222).
[5] See: “Donald Trump Announces a Presidential Bid,” The Washington Post, June 16, 2015, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2015/06/16/full-text-donald-trump-announces-a-presidential-bid/.