The Zarco

El Zarco is a particular and forgotten piece of Mexican literature. Written between 1874 and 1888 by Manuel Altamirano, cultural activist and crucial figure in the project of Modernity in his country, the novel was not published until after the death of its author. Even today it remains unjustly in the shadow of El Periquillo Sarniento by José Joaquín Fernández de Lizardi and Clemencia, Altamirano’s own previous novel.
El Zarco narrates Manuela’s tragic passion for the bloody bandit that gives the novel its title. Looting, murder and revenge give color to the story. As much as the debauchery, eroticism and obscenities of the undisciplined and uncontrollable populace, embodied in the bandits.
Here it is opposed to barbarism and passion, virtue and love between the selfless and honest Indian and Pilar, the young mestizo, docile and respectful of the social order.
Under the tears and embraces, the sublime landscapes and the passionate ravings hides a suggestive staging of the national, its ideals of citizenship and its civilizational pedagogy. El Zarco is a suggestive novel although the cultural picture it evokes has disappeared. Even though its romantic aesthetic has been surpassed, its pages articulate highly current questions and motifs.
Bad government, the ubiquity of theft, vigilante terror, inoperative authorities and the fragile infrastructure of the State characterize that Mexico that Altamirano portrays. In reality they have not disappeared, they even emerge more harshly in our times.
Nor have the racial, social and gender tensions and conflicts inscribed in this rich narrative faded. El Zarco is, in short, one of the many Latin American civilizational projects, which sought to defend and promote certain subjects, certain bodies and certain relationships. That is, to the detriment of others, excluded, invisible and silenced.

Edited by Adriana López-Labourdette.