Review: A Quiet Self-Loathing (A Review of America del Norte by Nicolas Medina Mora)
By Hugh Blanton
In an
interview with Elizabeth Gonzales James in The Rumpus, Nicolás Medina
Mora said that his novel América del Norte "was originally going to
be a book-length essay that braided an impressionistic history of Mexico."
In fact, you could say that the "failed" essays of the main character
in the novel, Sebastián Arteaga y Salazar, are the book-length essay the author
originally intended, and these essays even repeat much of the story's narrative
(making the book unnecessarily long at 455 pages). The book tries its best to
be complex—a book for serious readers—starting off with a dramatis personae, closing
with a three-page list of books for further reading, includes fifty-nine pages
of untranslated Spanish, an untranslated French poem, Old English writing, and
a little untranslated indigenous American language. Even some sheet music!
(Every section of the book is headed with untranslated Spanish, too, but this
doesn't impede the reader very much.) However, the complexity comes off as not
much more than horn-blowing pedantry.
When he
isn't being our tour guide/educator, much of América del Norte is
Sebastián agonizing over his race/identity. In Mexico he's too white, in
America, he's too brown. The novel jumps back and forth in time—the arrival of
the conquistadors in Tenochtilan, to Felipe Calderón's war on drugs—and back in
forth in place—Mexico City, Iowa City, New York City. Whenever and wherever we
are, race and privilege take center stage. Sebastián is from a wealthy and
powerful family in Mexico City. His father, Alberto Arteaga y Salazar, is
tapped by President Calderón to help fight Mexico's war on drugs, and then it
becomes apparent that we are reading autofiction here. Alberto Arteaga y
Salazar is a stand-in for Medina Mora's actual father, Eduardo Medina Mora
Icaza, the AG of Mexico from 2006 to 2009. (Possibly when we see a novel's main
character has an MFA we can assume it's autofiction anyway without even
checking the biography of the author. Yes, our protagonist Sebastián has an MFA
from Iowa City just like our author Medina Mora.)
Like a lot
of novels rolling off the presses recently, América del Norte takes its
obligatory shots at Donald Trump. The first one comes in subtly: Sebastián, who
doesn't like to dance, is asked by his girlfriend Lee to join her on a cantina
dance floor. He replies that he can't dance because of "bone spurs."
Sebastián refers to migrant detention centers under Trump as
"concentration camps," but omits that they were there long before
Trump ever took office and were still being utilized after he left. He makes
heavy weather of carrying his passport with him everywhere he goes after Trump
wins the 2016 election (no mentions, however, of how Barack Obama was labeled
"Deporter in Chief" by immigrants' rights groups during his two terms
of office). Partisanship and hypocrisy are mirror images of each other. While
Sebastián was in New York he was a journalist covering the NYPD. He has this to
say about them: "They spend most of their shift arresting Black and Latino
kids for petty shit like jumping the turnstile and every few weeks they kill a
civilian."
The novel
is divided into eight parts (Roman numerals of course!) and a prologue and an
epilogue. Medina-Mora introduces each part with "Your Correspondent"
and tells us what's about to come. This is all part of Medina Mora trying to be
a good post-modernist, attempting not only to make the novel actually be
difficult, but to make it appear difficult as well. He's well aware that
monolingual English speakers will skim/skip the many pages of untranslated
Spanish and other languages. He in fact seems to be telling non-Spanish-speaking
readers to take a hike when during a poetry reading in a bookstore the poet
goes on for a page and a half in untranslated Spanish. The pontificating in América
del Norte on history gets repetitive, Medina Mora includes it first in the
narrative of the story and then again in essays Sebastián is attempting to
write. (I say attempt—the essays are included as essays "I failed to
write.")
One of the
failed essays was to include a story of a magician in Europe who was exiled
from his country. The magician took up residence in a foreign city but the
sovereign from his native country sent an army to attack it. Again, the
magician flees, but not before writing a desperate letter to a friend:
I have discovered the secret of the pearl and the ring. I must leave soon, so there's no time to explain, but I have set it all down on a small sheet of paper, which I have tucked in the pages of the Talmud that I always carry in my briefcase. If anything were to happen to me, you must make every effort to find it. The message is written in code, but I trust you will be able to decipher it. When you do, you must convey it to the world. For the secret that has been revealed to me is no mere magic trick.
The
magician does not make it into the city; the gates are locked and the army is
closing in on him. He commits suicide by morphine overdose. If this sounds
curiously like a tale about Walter Benjamin's briefcase, it's because it is. Medina-Mora
includes in the back of the book a three-page list of books for further reading
for readers interested in the historical facts included in América del
Norte. One of the books is Notebooks from the Lost Briefcase by
Walter Benjamin. Of course, no such book exists, and Benjamin's briefcase as of
yet has not been found. In addition, the section of América del Norte devoted
to this failed essay is dedicated to Carol Jacobs, a literary critic who has
written extensively on Walter Benjamin. It's a nice little "Easter
Egg" Medina Mora has given to the fastidious reader.
Sebastián
and his girlfriend Lee have an odd, sort of open relationship. They are apart
through much of the novel: she in Colombia studying music, he moving back and
forth between Mexico and the USA. After Trump wins his election Sebastián fears he
may be deported. Lee suggests they get married—if need be—so that he can stay.
However, as happens with many "open" relationships, this one hits
some serious turbulence. The planned marriage is in jeopardy. (One of
Sebastián's lovers informs him that she's popped positive for chlamydia, now
he's got to tell Lee.) Sebastián starts considering alternatives to staying in
America, a place where he's built his life for a decade.
Sebastián
is back in Mexico City during the Mexican 2018 elections. Andrés Manuel López
Obrador has formed a new political party, the National Regeneration Movement
(MORENA), that promises to redistribute wealth and uplift Mexico's poor. This
of course would be a disaster for Mexico's elite, including Sebastián's family.
Obrador is leading in the polls and is certain to win. "I wanted
reassurance that the new government would limit its revenge on the figureheads
of the old regime—such as my father—to humiliation rather than
persecution." However, the years in American universities have made
Sebastián a good liberal, he actually wants the Mexican leftists to win. In a
letter that he writes to his teacher in Iowa City: "And if the left wins
the election, it will probably fail as well—though part of me wants to hope
otherwise, even if my family must pay." (In reality, Medina Mora's father
was charged with crimes after the election, charges that were later dropped due
to lack of evidence. Critic Levi Vonk, writing for Jacobin, says of him,
"it is not hyperbole to say he is one of the most disgraced politicians in
all of Mexico today." (Of course it is hyperbole.))
Medina-Mora has said that the 2016 election of Donald Trump and the 2018 election of Andrés Manuel López Obrador changed his life, "interrupted by History with a capital H." He even goes so far as to say he no longer understood his life and that's when the idea for América del Norte took hold. This of course reeks of self-importance, all the more so when he portrays himself as a victim in the novel. (A white male student at Iowa spits at Sebastián as he walks by, immigration officers giving him a hard time, guilt over his privilege.) This would have been a better book if it were nonfiction, but maybe Medina Mora thought that truth could only be told through fiction. It's more likely he was trying to escape truth.
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