Trouble In/Troubling The Contact Zone: Representations Of Mexico’s Article 33 in Jordi Soler’s La ultima hora del ultimo día and los rojos de ultramar

Abstract

The literature produced by Spanish exiles living in Mexico after the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939) has created important inroads to analyze the complicated relationships between the exiles and their Mexican hosts. Jordi Soler’s novels Los rojos de ultramar (2004) and La última hora del último día (2007) differ from past works regarding the Spanish exile in Mexico by starkly depicting the complexity of the historicized relationship between foreigner and citizen in Mexico in colonial terms and by assuming distinct literary forms. In particular, the books’ centralization of Article 33—a Constitutional article in Mexico that allowed the executive branch to expel foreigners without due process—offers new avenues of analysis into the interlaced structures of law, xenophobia, and xenophilia. This article seeks to read Article 33 in the context of colonial and anticolonial dynamics at the time the exiles depicted in the novels arrived in Mexico, permitting a deeper examination of Mexico’s relationship with its foreign-born population. The article ends with a gendered analysis of the invocation of Article 33 in the “contact zone” depicted in the books, illuminating the relationship between citizenship, coloniality, exile, and illuminating the relationship between citizenship, coloniality, race, exile, and heteropatriachal nationalism.