Hugo Moreno, Donde se acaba el norte

Abstract

Reviewed by: Donde se acaba el norte by Hugo Moreno Daryl Spurlock (bio) Hugo Moreno, Donde se acaba el norte. Glyph Publishing, 2021. Pp. 268. Reading Donde se acaba el norte is like wandering into a cabinet of curiosities whose curator is fascinated by New Mexico and its neighbors on both sides of the Mexican-US border. An imaginative work of fiction set mostly in New Mexico, Moreno's novel is grounded in a deep knowledge of Apache, Hispanic, and mestizo practices as they have developed there since the seventeenth century. Given its subject matter, one is tempted to substitute the words "history" or "historical fiction" to describe Moreno's narrative, but to do so would be to overlook one of the novel's great assets; Donde se acaba el norte questions the very nature of temporality and our (in)ability to accurately and chronologically recount the people, places, and events that precede us. Part of the satisfaction readers can draw from Donde se acaba el norte comes from piecing together precisely how characters and their eras relate to each other and to the novel's protagonist, who for simplicity's sake we can call Uriel/Diego. In broad terms, though, the plot unwinds in several settings: the seventeenth century, first in a Spanish mission along the Camino Real leading to Santa Fe and later in the mountains and plains of the Apache homeland, and the late twentieth century, in Mexican and US border states and in Ithaca, New York. Readers join Uriel/Diego on his shapeshifting and world-transforming adventure as he weathers—more successfully than most—the Inquisition and the harsh religious discipline of the colonizers' frontier mission. In episodes that resonate with Fray Servando's escapades in Arenas's El mundo alucinante, Uriel/Diego questions the faith and practices of his spiritual community. Unlike Servando, however, the protagonist of Donde se acaba el norte, unsure of himself and lacking the conviction of his brethren, hardly protests moments of shocking injustice. As a creature of his late-twentieth-century academic training in pluralistic postmodernism, Uriel/Diego finds himself able to recognize wrongs, but feels paralyzed by indecision in how to respond. Luckily for him, Moreno provides an escape hatch that sends Uriel/Diego on to the next stage of his quest and allows the protagonist to evade any duty to act. While some readers may find such sidestepping disappointing, others may, like Uriel/Diego himself, understandably be [End Page 117] ready to move from the confined, monotonous world of the mission and on to wider vistas. When Uriel/Diego finds himself far removed from a settlement along the Camino Real, he not only contends with the long-unconsidered Indigenous part of himself, but is also challenged to absorb a new cosmology and foreign-yet-familiar belief practices that are quite different from the doctrine taught in the mission from which he has emerged. Students of Native American history might find many of the scenes in this second setting edifying and indeed entertaining, but they, like Uriel/Diego, will remain at a remove, observing the practices without ever committing to participate. Editor's footnotes, peppered throughout the book but especially in this portion, add to the sense of an intellectual, rather than a spiritual, exercise. In each of these locales, faces and speech patterns modulate according to the epoch to which they correspond, but only faintly. Emphasizing the slipperiness of time and gender and language as fixed concepts—or perhaps as a nod to the creative inventiveness of human psychology—the protagonist discerns in the face of his American psychotherapist a feminized, 1990s manifestation of a male character we meet from centuries before. Similarly, the archaic Castilian of the Early Modern friars has the same distancing effect as the second-language Spanish of the Indian guide, Refugio, but both registers are accessible to twenty-first-century readers. Whatever the language conventions, if conversations often seem implausible, this is understandable, as they are uttered in the realm of the subconscious, projections of the knowledge and urges of the sleeping Uriel/Diego. Rather than dramatic recreations of naturalistic speech, dialogues reflect the logic of dreams and the stiltedness of medieval morality...