One of Mexico’s foremost social and political chroniclers and its most celebrated cultural critic, Carlos Monsiváis has read the pulse of his country over the past half century. The author of five collections of literary journalism pieces called crónicas, he is perhaps best known for his analytic and often satirical descriptions of Mexico City’s popular culture.

This comprehensive study of Monsiváis’s crónicas is the first book to offer an analysis of these works and to place Monsiváis’s work within a theoretical framework that recognizes the importance of his vision of Mexican culture. Linda Egan examines his ideology in relation to theoretical postures in Latin America, the United States, and Europe to cast Monsiváis as both a heterodox pioneer and a mainstream spokesman. She then explores the poetics of the contemporary chronicle in Mexico, reviewing the genre’s history and its relation to other narrative forms. Finally, she focuses on the canonical status of Monsiváis’s work, devoting a chapter to each of his five principal collections.

Egan argues that the five books that are the focus of her study tell a story of ever-renewing suspense: we cannot know “the end” until Monsiváis is through constructing his literary project. Despite this, she observes, his work between 1970 and 1995 documents important discoveries in his search for causes, effects, and deconstructions of historical obstacles to Mexico’s passage into modernity.

While anthropologists and historians continue to introduce new paradigms for the study of Mexico’s cultural space, Egan’s book provides a reflexive twist by examining the work of one of the thinkers who first inspired such a critical movement. More than an appraisal of Monsiváis, it offers a valuable discussion of theoretical issues surrounding the study of the chronicle as it is currently practiced in Mexico. It balances theory and criticism to lend new insight into the ties between Mexican society, social conscience, and literature.

“In Mexico,” writes Ilan Stavans in the introduction to this provocative new collection on Mexican culture and politics, “[the essay] is embraced as passionately as a sport.” While the American essay may be personal and confessional or erudite and academic, it is presumed to be truthful. By contrast, the Mexican essay pushes the boundaries between fact and fiction as writers seek to make their opinions heard—in literary journals, in newspapers, and even on cereal boxes. “What is real and what isn’t in a Mexican essay, only God knows,” concludes Stavans. In Hurricanes and Carnivals, Lee Gutkind, a pioneer in the teaching of creative nonfiction, brings together fifteen essays by Mexican, Mexican American, and Latin American writers that push the boundaries of style and form, showing that navigating “truth” is anything but clear-cut. Although creative nonfiction is widely thought to be an American art form, this collection proves otherwise. By blending fact and fiction, story and fantasy, history and mythology, these writers and others push the bounds of the essay to present a vision of Mexico rarely seen from this side of the border. Addressing topics that include immigration, politics, ecology, violence, family, and sexuality, they take literary license on a whirlwind adventure. C. M. Mayo shows us Mexico City as seen through the eyes of her pug, Picadou; Juan Villoro examines modern Mexico through the lens of demography; Homero Aridjis uses the plight of nesting sea turtles to document a slowly changing Mexican attitude toward natural resources; and Sam Quinones documents the decline of beauty-queen addiction in Mazatlán and tells us about the flower festivals where, according to lore, only two things matter: hurricanes and carnivals. For readers interested in a literary view of contemporary Mexico, as well as students of the creative nonfiction genre, this volume is essential

Regarded as among modern Mexico’s foremost creative writers, Octavio Paz, Carlos Fuentes, Carlos Monsiváis, and Elena Poniatowska are also esteemed as analyzers of society, critics of public officials, and both molders and mirrors of public opinion. This book offers a reading of Mexican current affairs from 1968 to 1995 through a comparative study of these four writers’ political work. In hundreds of articles, essays, and comments published in the Mexican press—Excélsior, La Cultura en México, La Jornada, Proceso, and many other publications—these writers tackled current affairs as events unfolded. Yet the lack of detailed examination of their contributions in the press has left a gap in our understanding of their vital role in raising awareness of national concerns as they were happening.

Claire Brewster has mined direct quotations from a host of publications to illustrate the techniques that they used in combating government and editorial restraints. Brewster first addresses the Student Movement of 1968—the violent suppression of which was a watershed in the relationship between the Mexican government and people—and illustrates the ways in which the student crisis affected the writers’ relationships with presidents Luis Echeverría Alvarez and José López Portillo. She next considers the profound social and political repercussions of the 1985 earthquake as described by Poniatowska and Monsiváis and the consequent emergence of Mexican civil society. She then outlines Paz’s and Monsiváis’s vociferous responses to the 1988 presidential election campaigns and their highly contentious result, and lastly she examines the Chiapas rebellion from January to July 1994.

The eloquent Zapatista spokesman, Subcomandante Marcos, challenged Mexican writers to a duel of words, and Brewster analyzes the ways in which the four writers took up the gauntlet—and in so doing reveals the development of their political thoughts and their relationships with the Mexican people and the federal government. The work of these four authors charts an important historical era, and a close examination of their essays reveals their maturation as writers and provides an understanding of the development of Mexican society. By bringing their opinions and attitudes to light, Brewster unearths a rich lode of insight into the inner workings of Mexican intellectuals and invites observers of contemporary Mexico to reconsider their role in reflecting social change.