Ana Clavel’s second novel, Shipwrecked Body (2005), focuses on the identity crisis experienced by Antonia, who awakens one morning in a man’s body and asks herself if she continues to be the same or if her new body has made her into a different person. In contrast to novels that chart identity through the exploration of the past, Antonia’s search for selfhood gravitates around her current physical, social and cultural circumstances. The present study analyzes...

The present essay examines the place of Ana Clavel in critical studies on contemporary Mexican fiction. Instead of situating her production vis-à-vis female contemporaries in what has been labeled the Boom Femenino, I argue that Clavel’s novels embody the ethos of a queer literature. A queer literature unpacks, decenters, and disobeys norms of gender, sex, and sexuality, and favors the posing of questions versus the providing of neatly packaged answers. Moving away from the subject,...

The present article offers an interpretation of Alberto Chimal’s first novel, The Slaves, published by this Mexican author in 2009, a novel proposing an analysis of sadomasochistic sexual relations. In the center of the narration, we encounter two couples, both homosexual, acting out various sadomasochistic practices ‒ some of them of an extreme nature: On the one hand, two women, one of them already older (Marlene) and (supposedly) the director of pornographic movies, and the...

This article employs Igor Primoratz’s ethics of sexuality to analyze the incestuous relationship between a thirteen year old girl and her uncle in the novel El lenguaje the las orquídeas (2007), by Adriana González Mateos. My critical inquiry starts with a basic question: What hides behind the multiple ways in which incest is represented here? The obvious answer would be: the disintegration of the family. By analogy, if the family falls apart, so does the...

pp. 155-165 This article studies the Sephardic sphere in the work of Myriam Moscona (Mexico City, 1955). It begins with an overview of this writer’s works, and then concentrates on two of her fundamental books on the subject: Tela de sevoya (2012) and Ansina (2015). The idea of displacement or wandering is explored not only as a family motive but also as the engine that nurtures the various explorations that Moscona has carried out throughout...

pp. 212-229 Over the last several years the need for transparency has grown in demand, generally and globally, in the hopes of a better future. However, such a promise can never entirely fulfilled for factual as well as ontological reasons. Based on the analysis of the painted picture, Sandra del Pilar (visual artist and art theorist) defines transparency as a specific property of all the representative media that tend to become invisible with respect to...

pp. 140-154 The following article deals with the experience of leftist and German-speaking political exiles in Mexico, following the persecution of National Socialist and Fascist governments perpetrated against them in Europe in the late 1930s and 1940s. It parts from the premise that the National Socialist construction that emerged in Germany and elsewhere at that time was built on exclusion. And, who were the social groups left out of this project? Although in the first...

pp. 130-139 Within the space of no more than a few years in the 1850s, three essays with similar transatlantic features, all written by literary authors, are published in the Hispanic world. Each of them is dedicated to portray a national literature and its greatest representants: besides José Zorrilla and his well-known essay México y los mexicanos, Álvares de Azevedo portrays from São Paulo the highlights of Portugal’s literature, and Juan Valera introduces Brazilian literature...

Luis de Carvajal, el Mozo, was part of a large Converso family that moved from Spain to New Spain (Colonial Mexico) in 1580. While some members of his family, like his brother Gaspar, a Dominican friar, and his uncle, Luis de Carvajal, el Viejo, a regional governor, were devout Catholics, Luis and most of his immediate family were passionately devoted to crypto-Judaism. Luis crafts a powerful narrative of religious sacrifice and creativity in his spiritual...

This article aims to give an overview of the life of an Irish accused by the Court of the Inquisition in Mexico, in the seventeenth century, considered a heretic and a rebel seeking independence from New Spain. His captivity for 17 years, from 1642 until his death in 1659, made his prison known to the Viceroy and the King in Spain. In it he found the Judaizers who had arrived in that city from Portugal...

The construction of the memory of immigrants from the Middle East went through several stages. Lebanese Maronites and Jews from the region left their places of origin to "make America" without a national identity; the latter emerged in exile. It developed with the events that took place in the territories that expelled them.

pp. 179-194 We take up the metaphors of contemporary capitalism in Mexico centered on two disseminated icons and symbols through political discourse and Mexican mass media. The «tunnels» of druglorg «Chapo Guzmán» and the «walls» of the current USA president. Donald Trump symbolically relates to describe the framework of power that these characters wield. In this paper, we make connections between media and cultural symbols such as the famous “tunnels” that Mexican drug trafficker were...

pp. 102-142. Concepts of in-between were established as a tool against the ontology of separations and against the logic of identity and difference, eradicating the consistency of binary classifications. The following article relates the different concepts to two paradigms: the geopolitical, whose objective is the aggression of Western thought as imperialist thought, and the aesthetic-political paradigm in which politics is questioned from aesthetics that dispenses with geopolitical locations. This second paradigm entails a meta-criticism with...

pp. 61-73. Tamaulipas, a State located in the northeast of Mexico, is the principal door of entry to the United States of migrants from Central America. The difficulty to cross the border has resulted in a mounting number of irregular immigrants who became stranded in this State because they could not reach the northern country. This article, based on a qualitative methodology, which includes in-depth interviews with thirty immigrants from Central America carried out during...

pp. 29-45. In Tijuana: crimen y olvido Luis Humberto Crosthwaite creates a narrative fiction as a mirror of a society that looses the capacity to broach the subject of its own disintegration. Confronting the absence of a constructive debate on forced disappearance of persons in media and politics and the lack of a social framework where the issue of the memory of the victims could be addressed, the novel proposes a reflection on the limits...

pp. 16-28. In this paper we study Latin-American female migration towards North in three short-stories of contemporary female Mexican writers. We explain some general ideas about what migration is and the role of woman in this situation. We propose that an exploration in not well-considered aspects of female migration is made in fictional discourses. We use a newspaper sample to analyze, in an hermeneutic frame, how female migrant is represented as victim and male-dependent. We...

pp. 57-68. This article seeks to discuss the importance of the radio media in Mexico, particularly the community and indigenous model, its social and cultural transcendence since the sixties, and the harassment and aggression it has suffered from local and federal governments in recent years. All this considering the Telecommunications and Broadcasting Reform 2013, and its respective secondary law 2014. By virtue of the complexity that implies going into all the points of the legal...

pp. 4-8.

pp. 86-108. While the research on the Spanish Republican exile in Mexico has mainly concentrated on the ‘intellectual male exile’ this article will focus on the female Republican exile. It attempts to analyze whether the promises of gender equality that were granted in the constitution of the Second Republic prevailed in exile, whether the Republicans transferred all democratic ideals equally to their exile or whether some achievements were less important to uphold in the Spanish...

pp. 30-51. This article proposes to identify the initial relationship between the Hispanic imperial elites and the Mexica elites as a process of catachresis. For this I use the text of Hernando de Alvarado Tezozomoc, Crónica Mexicana. The translation of the Mexica intellectual cosmos into imperial categories was feasible because in the process of elaboration of the text existential anxieties related to time and duration [1 and 2], to ritual forms and biopolitical forms of...

31-40 This paper discusses the ideas from which Carlos Monsiváis conceived and coordinated the book Viento Rojo: Diez historias del narco en México (2004). Special attention is given to the introductory essay; in it, Monsiváis offers a historical reflection, a cultural analysis, and an ethical approach to what is tentatively called "narco culture".

pp. 4-11.

pp. 85-98. The mass media, in particular television, have been the determining factor in generating pseudo-environments, maintaining pseudo-realities and introjecting emotions in citizens in order to influence their electoral behavior. These pseudo-environments are built with events to activate emotions that exert affective and behavioral pressure on the inhabitants. In this sense, surveys, as well as the news resource in political campaigns, turn out to be an instrument of persuasion of marketing and political advertising to...

pp. 35-41. In this paper we provide a balance of the last period of sessions of the Congreso de la Unión, we realized that the secondary regulation of telecommunications is still pending. Elements of the controversy are presented that require an analytical look to locate the actors that have entered into a paradox before the collective action that will exalt the mood in the telecommunications sector. A summary is made of what several opinion leaders...