Rarely does one include the novels of Mexico's long nineteenth century on a reading wish list. They are agonizingly long, overly sentimental, complicated, and far-fetched; none other than Carlos Fuentes blasted them for being shortsighted, dogmatic, and chauvinistic. Terry Rugeley's edited translation of Manuel Sánchez Mármol's 1903 novel Antón Pérez proves these prejudices wrong.Although representative of the often-cloying romantic literature that sought to immortalize Mexico's mid-nineteenth-century heroic struggle against European colonialism and Mexican monarchism, this tragic love story of a small-town pardo, set in the Gulf Coast state of Tabasco, has a darker tone, its depictions more realistic and unforgiving, its message exempt from the priggishness and predictability of earlier patriotic moral tales.Antón Pérez also tells the story of a momentous, transformative conflict in which the good guys beat the odds and won. But unlike more saccharine depictions, Sánchez Mármol's version of this story reveals a struggle riddled by accident, contingency, and incompetence, driven by rumor, deviousness, and bluster rather than principle. Petty local attachments override national aspirations, pragmatism covers up cowardice, women naturally support the enemy, and men fight and die for the wrong reasons. Unlike what occurs in those works hailed by literary critics as “foundational fictions,” love conquers nothing. Sánchez Mármol's diagnosis, made from the vantage point of a new century, is grim: formidable efforts swept away the nation's traditions, its habits and manners—for as he puts it in the novel, “He who says Progress says cataclysm”—but failed to remake its citizens, who on the whole remained as provincial, racist, and status-obsessed as they had been under colonial rule (p. 24).Like its predecessors, Sánchez Mármol's novel is populated by colorful, endearing characters. Antón Pérez features tropical versions of the familiar Mexican types crafted by artists throughout the nineteenth century: the kindly, highly educated priests whom anticlerical Liberal writers loved to introduce into their narratives; the fatuous, not-too-bright small-town dignitaries; the good-natured, surprisingly capable cowhand; the manly, clever, patriotic militia officers. Women—mothers especially—are devoted, self-sacrificing, and often very silly. But other protagonists break these comfortable but insipid molds: the opportunistic gachupincito who becomes a flamboyant imperialist commander; the wily, self-centered, manipulative, sexually aggressive older woman; the shy, dark-skinned costeño who can neither laugh nor dance. The antics of the first two are often, as the editor points out, hilarious. The third—Antón Pérez, the novel's hero—cuts a more disturbing figure: the hopes of this virtuous, hard-working, and intelligent protagonist for a better future are nonetheless dashed by the rigidities of caste and class and by the voracity and corruption of the elite. His tortured love for “that despair named Rosalba” leads him, against his instincts and convictions, to make choices that are not only wrong but despicable (p. 130).Antón Pérez is an outlier among the historical novels of its age. As a pessimistic, disparaging assessment of a heroic national episode as seen from the periphery, it is denser, more telling, and certainly more interesting. Terry Rugeley's introduction and copiously annotated translation make it accessible to an English-speaking audience while at the same time throwing light on its more engaging features: the peculiarities of the Tabascan geography and experience; the visions of disappointed revolutionaries, unable to recognize the nation that they had fought for; the tensions and connections between personal experience remembered and national memory exalted.One could not hope for a better guide to the convoluted stories set in a region that Sánchez Mármol wrote as both “scene and central character” (p. xii). Tabasco's native son was, as Rugeley points out, no Joseph Conrad, but in Antón Pérez he tells a good story and brings to life the nature of his state's lowlands: waterlogged, hot, sticky, noisy, ready to swallow men up whole (p. xx). Few historians know and understand the turbulent, often-bloody decades of the mid-nineteenth century in the Mexican southeast as well as Rugeley does. By weaving together context and analysis, he brings forth complexities that have been flattened out by seamless patriotic narratives. His translation is remarkable in that it manages—by, among other things, preserving the costeños' open-ended words and redolent speech patterns—to re-create, in a foreign language, a holistic sense of time and place (p. xxvii). By bringing historical knowledge, heart, and humor to the specialized, technical exercises of editing and translating, Rugeley reveals the powerful, relevant, fascinating read that was hiding inside a seemingly fuddy-duddy novel.
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Jul 9, 2021
Roseli Rodrigues-Mello + 3
Open Access