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ABSTRACT This article examines José Emilio Pacheco's poetic representations of Mexico City by advancing a theoretical framework derived from the discourses of ecocriticism and uneven geographical development. In combining the referential, material bases for Pacheco's poems about Mexico City, such as geological, ecological, and economic processes with his intertextual poetics, the study supplements scholarly attention to temporality and textuality in Pacheco's work by emphasizing its spatial and environmental dimensions. The article argues that Pacheco's short poems conceptualize Mexico City's development as an ongoing material and symbolic conquest of space in which natural, economic, and literary processes collide. These poems model an ecologically rooted geographical imaginary that uses literary language to measure empirical realities, including the smog that literally obscures mountains while figuratively constituting the linguistic and literary processes charged with representing them. Pacheco's ecopoetics meld self-reflexive intertextuality with an exploration of how language represents and often obscures these natural and economic processes.
That Mexico City has a pollution problem is undeniable. This assessment, however, tends toward synecdoche in the US, where the Mexican capital's smog and contaminated water obscure the perception of nearly everything else. In this construction of Mexico City, smog serves as a figure in which the part - "the pollution" - substitutes for the whole, that complex set of economic, political, cultural, geological, and ecological forces that produce the megacity of twenty million.
In a representative, if sardonic, example of this construction by a leading US Latino poet, Victor Hernández Cruz's "If You See Me in L.A. It's Because I'm Looking for the Airport" summons the specter of a "perfectly" polluted Mexico City as a means to understanding the comparatively less-polluted Los Angeles: "What would the Mexicans want / L.A. back for? / They got Mexico City / And can give lessons / On how to perfect / The pollution" (82-87). The pointed superficiality of Cruz's rhetorical question and playful response implicitly critiques the fractional viewpoint of Mexico City held widely in the US. These lines thus foreground external misperceptions of the city while insisting upon its abiding pollution problem, thereby functioning as a suggestive departure point for what I call losé Emilio Pacheco's concussive poetics that account for the complex, conflicting factors that comprise contemporary Mexico City.
First and most...