LatinosUSA

Mendoza’s Mythic Vision (625 words)

Paxtle. A river in central Mexico. An ecosystem. Or in Paulina Mendoza’s small book of that title, an extended, semi-narrative prose poem with a sonnet-sized paragraph per page for effortless flow. Or better yet, a non-linear mythological vision. Habitar y caudal (inhabit and flow). The form alone is a thing of interest.

Who populates this mythological landscape? There’s the first person narrator, whose fluid identity seems to move between a modern Mexican woman pondering the Consolidated Mining & Milling Company, its owner and its workers, and la mujer de collar de semillas (woman with the necklace of seeds), a diosa (goddess) of the primeval Mexican forest. Water is her body. The origin of life. And we keep coming back to less tractable symbols. Piedras en forma de ranas, gusanos, el sapo negro, sanguijueros, plantas con espinas (stones in the form of frogs, worms, the black toad, leeches, plants with spines).

The black toad, for example, pops up a couple of times. Amidst the germinating seeds and plants growing through cracks in the asphalt, fui bautizado por el sapo negro (I was baptized by the black toad). If baptist here, the sapo negro returns at the end as witness, su mirada registró la evidencia más asombrosa: las plantas hacen al mundo penetrando lo impenetrable con sus lentos movimientos (its gaze recording the most astonishing evidence: plants make the world by penetrating the impenetrable with their slow movements). Thus, the toad, back to the imagery of plants growing through the asphalt. An image of nature reasserting itself, but I’m not sure we should take the image as black and white, good and evil, organic imagery versus ugly asphalt. Our home space, to be sure, like that of the diosa, is naturaleza. But the miners struggle too, like us. The flow is all-embracing, río y piedra (river and stone), oro y plata (gold and silver), the primal forest and the Consolidated Mining & Milling Company. Los mineros tenían las mismas preocupaciones que yo: inestabilidad, incertidumbre, miedo, enfermedad (The miners have the same concerns as I: instability, uncertainty, fear, sickness).

In the sympolic (or potentially symbolic) field of Mendoza’s rich imagery, the gusanos y sanguijueros (worms and leeches) are particularly intriguing. The gusanos secos en el fondo de la tierra – dry worms in the depths of the earth, estranged from the watery landscape we share with the diosa – what do they represent? She pictures them terrifying and devouring the miners in some grand symbolic act, but no, no eran los seres fantásticos que yo imaginaba, no eran creaturas mitológicas … eran gusanos, solo eso (they aren’t the fantastic beings I imagine, aren’t mythological creatures … but only worms). This is midway through the book, but we already see the mythological diosa demystifying her own myth. It is that gap, that discontinuity, that breathing space between the visionary world and the grit and grind of the everyday world, the drenaje urbano (urban drainage), desechos humanos (human waste), the mining company – in that crack is where we must act, we must grow through, not relinquishing the visionary power but not ignoring the everyday, that’s where she leads us, and that’s where she leaves us.

To buy a copy of Paulina Mendoza’s Paxtle, HERE is a link to the Mexican vendor. I don’t think it ships international. You might have to ship to a friend in Mexico and go pick it up. Careful, though, if you’re coming from that “shithole country” up north, to borrow a favorite phrase of President Trump, you may never want to leave Mexico. (Because Paxtle may not be available in your country, Paulina has kindly given permission to attach it in pdf format free of charge for those who cannot purchase.)

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Translations part mine, part google.

Gary Gautier

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Poetry editor: Francisco Bravo Cabrera

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