UC Berkeley

Abstract

Los Demonios de la Mimesis:

textualidad de una tragedia en el México posrevolucionario

by

Yuri Herrera-Gutiérrez

Doctor of Philosophy in Hispanic Languages and Literatures

University of California, Berkeley

José Rabasa, Chair

The principal themes of this dissertation include the power of legal narratives in the formation of collective memory, the resistance that non-judicial texts can oppose to that power, and the ways to address the gaps in an archive of texts. This exploration begins with research on a tragedy that occurred on March 10, 1920, in the El Bordo mine in Pachuca, Mexico, when eighty-four miners died asphyxiated after the mine's administrators decided to close it off, cutting the oxygen to stop a fire. The word "accident" was used by the courts to absolve the mining company, and, legally, the story ended there. This work examines the existence of this episode in a handful of texts: how they function internally, what their relation is to truth, and what kind of subjects they create.

The analysis of the legal documents, media coverage, and fictional texts regarding the event looks for the logical and linguistic gaps and confronts each text with the imperatives of its own genre. The non-judicial texts--including newspaper articles, a novel, a nonfiction chronicle based on a conversation with the son of one of the survivors, and a metallic plaque in a park--tend to contradict or nuance the meaning imposed by the judicial file. However, with the exception of a piece written by a former miner, these texts function as objects that contribute in the end to the production of compliant citizens, prone to forgetting the past and to reproducing a certain social order, one that privileges some human lives over others.

Because the composite archive formed by all of these materials is one that establishes a normality with limited acknowledgment of agency, and because this is in part due to the limited number of items that comprise it, the final section of this dissertation explores texts that transform the effects of the archive. These additional texts offer a broader perspective of the society in which the archive was produced. They include a fictional text that represents the conscience produced by the archive, that is, a text that shows clearly how the archive functioned prior to the intervention.