Politics Gender and the Mexican Novel 1968 1988 Beyond the Pyramid Texas Pan American Series

The student massacre at Tlatelolco in Mexico City on October 2, 1968, marked the beginning of an era of rapid social change in Mexico, which has included a crisis in hegemony, a major economic crisis, the devastating 1985 earthquake, and the emergence of grassroots social movements and a multiparty system. Such social upheaval has long been the concern of Mexican novelists and other intellectuals, and the generation writing in the years since 1968 is no different. In this illuminating study, Cynthia Steele explores how the writers of the past two decades have responded to the 1968 student movement and to the social crisis it signaled in terms of political change and gender identity. The study opens with a panoramic view of political developments between 1968 and 1975, together with the various trends in post-1968 Mexican narrative. In succeeding chapters, Steele analyzes in detail novels by four outstanding authors--Hasta no verte Jesus mio (1969) by Elena Poniatowska; Palinuro de Mexico (1977) and Noticias del imperio (1987) by Fernando del Paso; Las batallas en el desierto (1981) Jose Emilio Pacheco; and Cerca del fuego(1986) by Jose Agustin. Each of these works represents a major tendency of the past twenty years: testimonial literature, the Joycean "total novel, " the neorealist Bildungsroman, and "La Onda." Each novel, in a highly original fashion, addresses the dilemma of belonging to a country whose present is felt to be unequal to its historical promise, in which the first social revolution of the twentieth century has been displaced by authoritarianism and crisis. The final chapter surveys narrative of the period 1985-1988, when new social movements, including neocardenismo, anurban housing movement, and popular feminism, emerged from the ruins of the 1985 earthquake to militate for a more democratic political and economic system. The study concludes with an extensive bibliography of narrative, literary theory, cultural studies, and historical and soci