The Language of Pained Bodies: History, Translation, and Prostitution in Cristina Rivera Garza's Nadie me verá llorar (1999) (original) (raw)

“La patria es impecable y diamantina”: Performing Diamantina in Cristina Rivera Garza’s (Non)Fiction

Latin American Literary Review, 2021

Cristina Rivera Garza’s (non) fiction trajectory is a dialogue of interests threaded by her passions for translation, history, poetics, among many other topics. In this article, Diamantina -- a repetitive character in the author’s corpora -- is traced to analyze how gender and cultural memory are portrayed in Nadie me verá llorar (1999) Ningún reloj cuenta esto (2002) and Dolerse: textos desde un país herido (2011). By commenting on Ramón López Velarde’s famous stanza “La patria es impecable y diamantina” in “Suave patria” (1921), Rivera Garza proposes an alternative way of performing nation by women who resist the virtuous adjectives exalted by Velarde in post-revolutionary Mexico, which can be threaded to the glitter used in recent public demonstrations against femicides and gender-based violence. Narrative memory is proposed to name the intersections of intertextuality and cultural memory in her literary cultural production that goes beyond the borders of a nation. This article centralizes the short-story, “La alineación también tiene su belleza” in Ningún reloj cuenta esto, which is set in San Antonio, Texas and New York City, to analyze Mexican canonical representations of women as Patria from a transnational lens.

Antinovela negra: Cristina Rivera Garza’s La muerte me da and the Critical Contemplation of Violence in Contemporary Mexico (2014)

Cristina Rivera Garza’s 2007 novel La muerte me da contributes significantly to current debates over the representation of violence in Mexico and strongly challenges the conventions of generic crime fiction. Her radical rewriting of the novela negra’s iconic corpse encounter initiates a complex reflection on problems of narrative subjectivity, as she turns away from the facile realism of the contemporary novela negra and back toward the self-conscious reflexivity and intertextual play of the Sur group. The novel’s sustained references to visual and performance art (Goya, Abramović, the Chapman brothers) support a nuanced critique of the ethics of representation.