“Esto es un Western”: el giro norte mexicano hacia el Pacífico en la literatura mexicana contemporánea

Abstract

This essay explores the interest shown in the history of Chinese immigration to Mexico in both the novel Ojos de lagarto (2009) by Bernardo Fernández (Bef), and the chronicle La casa del dolor ajeno (2015) by Julián Herbert. It also analyzes the deliberate use of the North American Western genre to create a historical review of problems such as the Mexican drug war and the criminalization of immigration. While the Mexican narconarrative has traditionally adopted the literary conventions of crime fiction, the use of the Western invites us to interrogate the current violence at the very moment of the violent consolidation of Mexico’s northern States, before and beyond the consolidation of an urban legal order presupposed by detective fiction.