Surrounded by high mountains (the Sierra de las Cruces, the Sierra de Ajusco Chichinauhtzi, the Sierra de Guadalupe), dominated to the south by the Iztaccihualt and Popactepelt Volcanoes, Mexico City was built on an island in Lake Texcoco. It was on this site that the nomadic Aztecs founded their capital Tenochtitlan in 1325, where they observed the symbol they had been searching for for a long time: an eagle, perched on a cactus, devouring a snake (image contained in the Mexican flag). In the 16th century, the Spanish took the city of Tenochtitlan, buried it and built a new city on the site: Mexico City. Mexico became independent in 1821, but the city was successively invaded by the United States army in 1847 and by French troops in 1863. In the 20th century, revolutions followed one another: the Mexican Revolution (1910-1920) the war of the “Cristeros” (1926-1929), the repression of student demonstrations in Tlatelolco (1968), the Zapatista insurrection in Chiapas in 1994.
Mexico City is the third largest city in the world (19 million inhabitants). It extends into the Valley of Mexico at an altitude of more than 2,300 meters. This vast metropolis of more than 2,000 square km includes the Mexican capital and its 16 districts, but also 40 other municipalities in the State of Mexico. The capital alone has 8.8 million inhabitants and has a very high birth rate and an influx of people from the countryside and other Mexican cities. But the size of the megalopolis also represents a weakness. Every day, 2 million vehicles invade the 10,000 kilometers of roads, causing huge traffic jams and chronic pollution problems.
The population doubled between 1970 and 2000 despite emigration to the United States which plays an important role in its evolution. From an ethnological point of view, it should be noted that 60% of Mexicans are mestizos, that is to say descendants of both Spanish colonizers and Indigenous peoples. In Mexico City, another percentage of Mexicans are descended from Europeans, mainly Spaniards, called in Mexico "criollos" (Creoles), but also French and Germans who emigrated to Mexico in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, to whom various communities are added: Lebanese, Chinese, Japanese, among others. A “melting pot” that Le Clézio describes as follows: “[…] we were in the crater of the future, in a bubbling caldera where anything could happen, mixtures of races, myths, interests” (R, 438).
The 19th century city, between Alameda and Chapultepec, is in the process of being renovated: large glass and steel buildings, skyscrapers, are replacing neoclassical style buildings. The luxury neighborhoods – which try to keep their charm – contrast with the slums which shelter millions of inhabitants in shacks built along muddy paths, which gives the current city an image of poverty.
Mexico in Leclezian work: under the sign of antithesis
Mexico was my founding shock. This is the country of the real revolution. When I arrived there for the first time, in 1967, I had the feeling of having the revolution before my eyes at every moment. I will never forget these migrant families who, driven by poverty, went north and crossed the continent in the vain hope of passing through the fence to find work in the United States. (Garcin, 2003, 3)
Mexico City in the work of J.M.G. Le Clézio has a side of light and a side of shadow, it is a city of contrasts which become more accentuated with the passage of time. The Mexico which serves as the setting for the love story of Diego and Frida (1993) is not the same as that discovered by the author of this fictionalized biography during his stay in 1968:
At the end of the 1920s, Mexico City was not yet this monstrous metropolis of modernity, devastated by poverty, suffocated by factories and automobile traffic, a sort of hell of the future where destruction was inevitable… It is a tropical capital where we breathe the purest air in the world, “the most transparent zone of air” […] where, at the end of the main central streets, the snow-capped peaks of volcanoes stand out, where the interior patios of old Spanish hotels buzz with fountains, music, and the light rustle of hummingbirds. Where every evening, on the Alameda, couples of lovers walk, and groups of young girls in long dresses and ribboned hair. (D&F, 81)
This book devotes an important place to the Blue House of Cayocàn, now the Frida Kahlo Museum, and to various places: Ministry of Education, Chapingo Agricultural School, Preparatory School, also present in Revolutions, where Diego Rivera paints his frescoes murals.
However, it was quite late, in the novel Revolutions (2003), with strong autobiographical inspiration, that Le Clézio – who lived in Mexico for a long time – took the city of Mexico as the setting for a fiction, of which he described in chiaroscuro… Revolutions, “[th]is big book of leaks” (Garcin, 2003, 4) narrates the wandering of Jean Marro, in search of his identity: from Nice to London, from London to Mexico, back in France and finally to Mauritius. The protagonist's journey presents itself as an autobiography, a coming-of-age novel, a travel diary, and a personal diary. In this hybrid story several stories intersect and overlap at the same time which have as a backdrop the revolutions throughout History... or the history of revolutions: French Revolution, experienced by the ancestor of Jean Marro, revolt of the Maroons in Mauritius, told by the slave Kiambé, revolt and killing of students in Tlatelolco in 1968, paralleled with the massacre of the Aztecs.
In Revolutions (2003), the chapter devoted to Mexico is brief, but of crucial importance in the economy of narration. The title of this part, “A border” (R, 433), a polysemous title, refers on the one hand to the geographical border where Mexican migrants try to cross to the United States, fleeing poverty, and on the other leaves for the border in the life of Jean Marro. Indeed, this stage presents itself symbolically as the opening to another reality, the test par excellence in one's initiatory journey.
The first part (435-448) describes the itinerary of Jean Marro to discover the city of Mexico. But behind this “he” is revealed the image of the author who relives and recreates his own experiences, his vision of the city and the most emblematic streets:
My books always feature moments from my story […] I invented Jean Marro so as not to have to write me. He looks a lot like me, but he's not me. Let’s say that Jean is a twin brother from whom I cannot detach myself but from whom I can move away at any time… (Garcin, 2003, 2)
The incipit of the chapter: “The Colonia Guerrero was the dream place to change your skin” (R, 435) introduces the description of a space a priori positively connoted. This popular part of the city is a “friendly neighborhood” (R, 435), and Jean “had learned to love the routine of life in the colonia Guerrero” (R, 437).
The frenetic movement of the crowd, the deafening noises of Mexico City return like a refrain: “Busy groups were coming out of the subway entrances […], people were running on the pavement […] Street children were running between the cars at crossroads", "the noise of traffic outside, the traffic jams on Isabel la Católica, the honking of taxi horns" (R, 438), "[...] dazed by the noise of the engines, by the movement of the crowd” (R, 439). The dynamism and noise contrast with moments of calm and serenity at the beginning and end of the day:
These were the two moments of the day that Jean preferred, when this city stopped beating with its frenzied impulse, and everything slowed down like a fever, subsided, and the air became more tender, sweeter. First there was the morning, around eight o'clock, when Jean left his house to go get bread on the corner of Guerrero […] The other moment was at nightfall, in a pearl gray twilight, when people lingered before returning home, strolling in Mosqueta […] (R, 493)
The silence, the shadow, “the past exhumed in all these books” (R, 438) that Jean reads at the library on rue Argentina, allow us to relive the moments of happiness with Aunt Catherine: “It was a bit like “the impression he once felt listening to Aunt Catherine talk about Rozilis” (R, 439).
The intrusion of Spanish words into the textual space helps to highlight the picturesqueness of daily life in Mexico and introduces a specific poetry. We will take as examples the vocabulary of food: the “comida corrrida” (R, 436), a meal composed of three dishes, which is inspired by the three stages of bullfights (generally a soup for the first part, rice or pasta or even a salad for the second and finally a main course – where three or four options are offered – for the third); or the “melancholy” of “this shrill, descending sound of the siren of the tamale seller” (Ibid.), name given to several dishes of Indigenous origin, steamed and surrounded in leaves from the cob of the same corn plant.
The somewhat idyllic vision of the colonia Guerrero echoes the "geographical metaphor" (Gabrielle Althen, 1989, 131), the "light" of the magnificent landscape which is offered to the protagonist's view and which contrasts strongly with the “shadow” of the “monstrous metropolis” (D&F, 81):
I think you would have liked that. All this grey, the never-ending twilights, the mist that erases everything. The mountains around […] The volcanoes all over the south, I wrote their names for you, following the chain they form around Mexico, like a necklace that I would like to offer you […]. (R, 485)
City of contrasts, Janus city... The narrator discovers the city of migrants when he sets out in search of traces of the Ruizs. He comes up against the terrible reality of the city of Naucalpan where migrants are forced to live in the miserable conditions of the slum:
Naucalpan is where economic migrants end up when they no longer know where to go. They have no choice. Either they return to the village they left, or they accept that they are sent to Naucalpan in the slum. (R, 463)
But he likes that Mexico is a cosmopolitan city, lively and noisy, where several races coexist:
And also, he had dreamed […] the mixtures of races, myths, interests. Similar to London, but as vast as an entire country, with streets a hundred kilometers long, towers, ruins, abandoned fields, pyramids […] and above all this moving crowd, never stopping […] this dark crowd, obstinate, stocky, deformed, at times so beautiful, faces of ancient statues […] sometimes ugly, beggars, dead-ends […]. (R, 470)
The figure of the antithesis also concerns the relationships between the various populations. On the one hand, the odious Rollès-Lalanne, installed in "his ivory tower" (R, 471) represents people of high status, the "afrancesada" society (R, 480) which despises the Indians in an atmosphere where carelessness and frivolity predominate:
as Jean spoke to him about the descendants of the Aztecs living miserably in Guerrero, Rollès-Lalanne gave a disdainful sneer: “Tramps, vagabonds,” he said. As long as this country does not get rid of the Indians, it will carry the weight of underdevelopment. (R, 473)
Marina Salles rightly points out the hypocrisy of this character, “a rich, unscrupulous businessman, a passionate collector of pre-Hispanic art and yet full of contempt for the descendants of the Aztecs” (Salles, 2006, 83). Le Clézio thus proceeds to “denounce the xenophobia exercised against the descendants of the Aztec people” (Cavallero, 2009, 305). This society of privileged people brutally clashes with the other social reality embodied by both Ruiz and his family who, fleeing misery and poverty, refugees in the slum of Naucalpan in the great suburbs of Mexico City personify the migratory movements – “he was from the state of Veracruz, he had left to look for work in the North […] they no longer had money to continue their journey” (R, 446) –, and by the Indians Pamela and Joaquín:
She [Pamela] had her roots in the mountains around Mexico City, she was linked to this place by centuries of endurance, of injustice. She was not just a pretty Indita (little Indian) […].
[Joaquín] looks very Indian, a bit callejero (from the street). (R, 442)
They represent the insurgent students who survive the Tlatelolco massacre, and who finally succeed in crossing the border after a long journey: “they try to pass under the border wire, in Nogales, in Juarez” (R, 463). They set off on an adventure, fleeing injustice and intolerance, in a “car [which] took them into a landscape of phantasmagoria” (R, 493) towards a new life which will lead them to Denver, Colorado. And, just like the blue men of Desert (1980), “[t]hey disappear” (R, 498).
Maria Luisa Bernabé Gil
Translated by Adina Balint
(2024)
RÉFÉRENCES BIBLIOGRAPHIQUES :
ALTHEN, Gabrielle, « Narration et contemplation dans le roman de Le Clézio », Sud n°85-86, Marseille, 1989, p. 129-145 ; CAVALLERO, Claude, (2009), Le Clézio témoin du monde, Clamecy, Calliopées, 2009 ; Encyclopédie Larousse, Mexico (s.d.). http://www.larousse.fr/encyclopedie/ville/Mexico/133004, consulté le 9 mai 2016 ; Encyclopédie Larousse, Mexico (s.d.). http://www.larousse.fr/encyclopedie/divers/Mexique_histoire/187027, consulté le 9 mai 2016 ; France Diplomatie, Mexique (2016), http://www.diplomatie.gouv.fr/fr/dossiers-pays/mexique/presentation-du-mexique/article/geographie-et-histoire-108465, consulté le 9 mai 2016 ; GARCIN, Jérôme, (2003), « Les révolutions de Le Clézio », http://bibliobs.nouvelobs.com/romans/20081009.BIB2166/les-revolutions-de-le-clezio.html, consulté le 15 avril 2016 ; Gran Enciclopedia Larousse, Barcelona, Editorial Planeta, 1992 ; LE CLÉZIO, J.-M..G., Diego et Frida. Paris, Gallimard, coll. « Folio », Éd. Stock, 1993 ; Révolutions, Paris, Gallimard, 2003 ; SALLES, Marina, Le Clézio. Notre contemporain, Rennes, Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2006.