"Of the Smog": José Emilio Pacheco's Concussive Poetics of Mexico City

Abstract

This article examines José Emilio Pacheco's poetic representations of Mexico City by advancing a theoretical framework derived from the discourses of ecocriticism and uneven geographical development. In combining the referential, material bases for Pacheco's poems about Mexico City, such as geological, ecological, and economic processes with his intertextual poetics, the study supplements scholarly attention to temporality and textuality in Pacheco's work by emphasizing its spatial and environmental dimensions. The article argues that Pacheco's short poems conceptualize Mexico City's development as an ongoing material and symbolic conquest of space in which natural, economic, and literary processes collide. These poems model an ecologically rooted geographical imaginary that uses literary language to measure empirical realities, including the smog that literally obscures mountains while figuratively constituting the linguistic and literary processes charged with representing them. Pacheco's ecopoetics meld self-reflexive intertextuality with an exploration of how language represents and often obscures these natural and economic processes.