Post-Apocalyptic Violence in 21-st Century Mexican Fiction

Many contemporary Mexican novels belong to the post-eschatological or post-apocalyptic genre, yet few literary critics, if any, will categorize them as such since they are not explicitly so. More particularly they are not considered as belonging to this genre because the authors themselves do not present us with a post-apocalyptic scenario, but rather, with the representation of contemporary Mexican reality with all its political and social institutions as they are. Nonetheless, because of the dystopic nature of present-day Mexican reality, it is hermeneutically easy to identify in this type of fiction all the trappings of the modern post-apocalyptic genre as they have evolved in the popular imaginary: there is in Mexico a visible post-apocalyptic scenario and one can find hordes of people, homeless or not, carrying their lives almost as do the living dead. But there is another more subtle convention, one that unmistakably places these novels within the post-apocalyptic genre: what seems like a Hobbesian approach to violence. We are referring, of course, to Hobbes’s famous description of life in its “natural state” (1904, 84). The post-eschatological site, like the natural state, lacks social order and is, therefore, by definition constantly in a brutishly perpetual war of all against all (1904, 151).