It’s hard to describe América del Norte (Soho Press, 2024), the genre-bending, century-hopping debut novel from Nicolás Medina Mora. Hyper-intellectual, Bolaño-esque critique of our modern age? Yes. A Doris Lessing-style meta-text about the process of creation? Also, yes. A frank treatise on US–Mexico relations post-NAFTA, with incendiary takedowns of systems like racism, colonialism, privilege, and power that corrupts both countries? ¡Absolutamente! But at its core, I believe it is a love story.
América del Norte follows Sebastián, a self-proclaimed Mexican nepobaby, or child of privilege. The son of a Supreme Court Justice, Sebastián has a degree from Yale and a spot in the University of Iowa’s storied MFA program. He falls in love with an American musicologist and is trying to establish permanent residency in the United States. He travels back and forth between Iowa and Mexico City for social and family commitments as his mother is dying of cancer. Caught between two worlds and belonging nowhere, Sebastián finds himself viewed as a stereotype in the United States and uncomfortable with his extreme privilege in Mexico. Besides the relationship between Sebastián and his American girlfriend, which forms a major part of the plot, love is the echo behind every translation, however impossible, and in every critique, however trenchant.
América del Norte is funny, tragic, sprawling, self-indulgent, dirty, beautiful, and complicated. In short, it’s a messy novel for our messy times. And I love mess. I spoke with Nicolás Medina Mora via Google Docs about his debut novel, its braided history of Mexico and the US, the heterogeneity of temporality, and why he thinks the novel’s most important theme is time. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
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The Rumpus: Can you tell me a little about how you came to the idea of América del Norte? How did the story evolve over time?
Nicolás Medina Mora: The story itself, the plot of the novel, was a relatively late development. América del Norte was originally going to be a book-length essay that braided an impressionistic history of Mexico. When I began writing the book, I was relatively happy. Then geopolitical events—the election of Donald Trump in the United States and later of Andrés Manuel López Obrador in Mexico—derailed the course of my biography. As I began coming to terms with the fact that I was not going to be able to stay in the United States, where I had lived for ten years, and that I would have to return to Mexico, where the new government was openly hostile to my family, I had an epiphany: my boring, privileged life had been interrupted by History with a capital H. This interruption was unfortunate, but it also meant my life was suddenly interesting to me,if not anyone else. I no longer understood my life. That’s when the idea of América del Norte began to coalesce. I came to see that what I was experiencing was a direct consequence of the history of the continent. The result was that the book became increasingly narrative, until one day I printed it out to revise it and realized what I had in my hands was no longer an essay but a novel.
Rumpus: That’s an incredible realization to have, and how terrifying—to feel as though centuries of history are converging right on you. Identity plays a major role in the story and in the narrator’s life. Sebastían says, “In the eyes of the WASPs . . . all Mexicans, even those of unmixed European ancestry, were metaphysically brown.” Did you think about your identity before you moved to the United States for college, or did it become a larger preoccupation after spending time in the US?
Medina Mora: I can actually pinpoint the exact moment when the question [or identity] first came alive for me. I was halfway through my first semester of college when a white classmate who belonged to this bizarre debating society that I was considering joining said it was great I was interested in the club, because having no people of color on the membership roll wasn’t a good look. This was bewildering to me because I had never really thought of myself in racial terms. In my mind, it was obvious I was white. Then, a few weeks later, another incident intensified the question.
The Mexican Student Association and the European Students Association organized a joint party with a frankly fucked-up theme: Colonizers and Colonized. The Mexican students—most of whom, like me, were part of our country’s white elite—dressed up as Aztecs. The European students, as conquistadores. Predictably, there was an outrage: the kids from the Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán and other Latine organizations were furious. They pointed out that the international students from Mexico were in no way colonized but rather the descendants of white settlers—in a word: colonizers. The contradiction between those two views—the white classmate who didn’t think I was white [and] the brown classmates who knew I wasn’t brown—was fascinating. I’ve never stopped thinking about it because I’m convinced that there, in the racial ambiguity that makes it possible for people like me to be seen as both white and not-white, as colonizers and colonized, lies the secret key that unlocks the history of this brutal, violent, beautiful continent, from the conquest of Tenochitltán to the Mexican–American War and the North American Free Trade Agreement.
Rumpus: Good grief, what a party theme.
Of time in Mexico, you write: “Eras nested within eras, cycles contained cycles. . . . That was why history—all history, but especially Mexico’s—was less a line of successive events than a fractal of chaotic echoes.” How do you think time moves in Mexico? Did you ever feel that time worked differently in the US than in Mexico? And how did you conceive of time in this novel?
Medina Mora: The novel’s real secret subject, its most important theme, is time. The ideas I was trying to convey in that regard were informed by a philosopher with terrible politics and brilliant insights: Martin Heidegger. In his scheme, the human experience of time, what he calls “temporality,” doesn’t fit in the quantifiable chronology of synchronized clocks. It’s “turbulent” instead of predictable or consistent. For example: the walk from my apartment in Colonia Escandón to the offices of Revista Nexos in Colonia Condesa, which, according to my phone, takes fifteen minutes, can feel longer or shorter depending on my mood. Why did we decide the clock on my phone is a more accurate way of measuring time than my own experience, or even that time-as-life—lifetime—can be measured at all?
A day in Mexico City is not the same as a day in the Tierra Caliente of Michoacán, let alone in New Haven, New York, or Iowa City. Temporality varies wildly, depending on where you’re standing, where you are coming from, where you are going, and who you are. That last bit, of course, is among other things, a question of class. A day in Mexico City isn’t the same for a domestic worker, who spends two or three hours in the subway to get to their job, than for a bourgeois editor, who can roll out of bed less than half an hour before a meeting, nor for an American expat who doesn’t need to work at all because the exchange rate has made him into a millionaire.
I think that’s why Heidegger insists that the heterogeneity of temporality, of our lifetime, is inseparable from the fact that our lives inevitably take place within History. If nothing else, that idea explains why time in Mexico has always struck me as weirder, more out of joint, than time in America: History is more alive here than in the US. Shit happens everywhere, of course, but in my country shit really happens. Hence the formal structure of América del Norte, which spins around a device I associate with film montage and that I like to call “the handbreak” the sudden jump-cut between narrative and essay, between the future and the past, between the personal and the political.
I wanted form to mimic content, so I tried to find a way in which the structure itself called attention to the fact that different temporalities can coexist in the same moment. Sometimes those temporalities crash into one another. That’s what happens, for instance, when History interrupts one’s private drama.
Rumpus: Your novel reminds me a lot of The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing. Lessing’s book is also somewhat fragmentary, as the main character tries to coalesce pieces into an uber-text: the Golden Notebook. This reminds me of the collage-like effect of your novel, where people and pieces of history make an aggregate portrait of Sebastián, our narrator. Lessing’s book is also about the act of creation—trying to write and approximate truth in fiction—and I see parallels with your novel there, as well. América del Norte is, in some ways, a narrative of the book’s own creation. Is that fair?
Medina Mora: That’s so kind of you to say. There was actually a point when the different parts of América del Norte were titled “Notebook I,” “Notebook II,” and so on. But in the end, I decided to head each section with a dateline: “Part I—Mexico City, May 2016.” The point was mostly to make the book easier to follow. The structure was confusing enough already, and clearly situating each part in space and time seemed like a good idea. Another reason was that, upon closer inspection, it turns out that Sebastián couldn’t have written the more “novel-y” parts of the book on the same timelineas the essays.
With this, I don’t mean to say that it would be implausible for Sebastián to have written what are presumably drafts of his failed MFA thesis at the same timeas the events he’s narrating. These longer disquisitions are divided into fragments that appear interwoven with chapters from the various narrative plots of the novel: You read the start of an essay about the Conquest of Mexico, then a bit from Sebastián’s falling out with a Chicanx classmate, then the second part of the essay, then the second part of the narrative, and so on. The question then becomes: When did the writing of these two threads—the essayistic and the narrative—take place in relation to one another and in relation to the events being narrated?
The only way to give a logically consistent account of the temporality of Sebastián’s narration, I think, is to posit a third timeline that’s neither that of “living”—the story this guy tells us about his life—nor that of “reading”—that guy’s reflections on a number of subjects that, he insists, sometimes against all evidence, are intimately related to his story. That third timeline is not so much the timeline of “writing”—after all, Sebastián writes constantly about both himself and his continent—as the timeline of montage, of cutting and pasting, of splicing and rearranging—the timeline of thenovel.
Rumpus: Can you speak about your attraction to Neo-Baroque art?
Medina Mora: Though the baroque may be long dead in the Anglophone world, it remains alive and well in the fictional region that some still insist on calling Latin America. English literature left the baroque behind in the nineteenth century, when insufferable Romantics like Lord Byron—a sad-boy hack who mistook cheap rhymes for music and commonplace horniness for originality—and Wordsworth—a sentimental man-child who ought to have become a priest, or a reverend, or a minister, or whatever the Protestant heretics call the officiants of their faux-masses, and thus spared us Latinate readers his sermons—decided that literature should be about giving linguistic expression to the author’s pre-linguistic feelings—what we call “experience”—rather than language and metaphysical vertigo—what we call “literature.” This development in literary history was a tragedy. Imagine going from John Donne and the Shakespeare of The Tempest to, I don’t know, Lord Tennyson.
Hispanophone literature, on the other hand, was blessed by fate and spared Romanticism. We went straight from the baroque to modernism. The persistence of language-for-the-sake-of-language, of the meta-literary spirit of Miguel de Cervantes and Luis de Góngora, is visible in the work of novelists who embraced the Neo-Baroque label, such as José Lezama Lima and Alejo Carpentier, but also in writers who are better known in the English-speaking world, such as Jorge Luis Borges and Gabriel García Márquez. They wrote books about history and metaphysics, yes, but also books about books—books about reading, rather than about living, literature about literature, rather than experience.
So you could say América del Norte was an attempt to marry the Neo-Baroque spirit of so-called “Latin American literature,” and a novelistic tradition that, on the surface, has more in common with the Romantics than with my beloved Borges: North American autofiction. The implicit thesis of the book is that these two seemingly incompatible approaches to literature are in fact so close that, much like Mexico and the United States, they bleed into one another.
Rumpus: I snort-laughed at “a sad-boy hack who mistook cheap rhymes for music and commonplace horniness for originality.” América del Norte is exactly this project as you say. Did you feel in this novel as though you had to explain Mexico to Americans? And if so, do you feel that you succeeded?
Medina Mora: I did feel like I had to explain Mexico to American readers—and not just while I was writing the novel or in the novel itself. For better or worse, I’ve spent most of my adult life so far explaining Mexico to Americans. In college, my classmates were understandably curious about the country. When I worked at BuzzFeed, I took time off the crime beat to write such ghastly things as an “explainer listicle” about the history of Cinco de Mayo. At Iowa, the workshop’s response to my work was so much better when I wrote about Mexico. Now that I live in Mexico, it happens less frequently. I’m glad that I have a job that consists for the most part in helping Mexicans explain Mexico to other Mexicans, but I can’t deny that I misspent my youth thinking in American terms and writing for an American reader. I did it willingly, of course, even enthusiastically. But if we zoom out, the fact that becoming an explainer of Mexico was a possible path for me was in no way a product of my will. That’s what I mean when I say we live in history: Who among us can say that the life they’re leading is the product of their choices and not a staging of the script they were handed at birth? I played the part I was assigned by my time: educator if you’re generous, tour-guide if you are not—or, better still, but only if we can agree that the word designates at once a gesture of love and an act of treason: translator.
When I first moved to America, I knew very little about Mexico. More than most of my college classmates, sure, but not much more than what you learn in secondary school and absorb by osmosis growing up in the country. When I got to Iowa and realized that I was expected to write about Mexico, it dawned on me that I couldn’t rely on memories from long ago, dinners, and high school classes. And so, I started reading about Mexico seriously. My project of giving myself a Mexican education became even more urgent after Trump got elected and I began to realize that, in the eyes of the American government, and as it turned out, in the eyes of an American I loved, I would always be defined by the county where I was born.
I don’t want you to think it was all bad. There was genuine joy in sharing what I was learning. There’s pleasure in playing the part of the foreigner, in the dialectic of similarity and difference. Cultural exchange is inevitably grounded on desire: I want to know more about you, about the ways in which we are alike and unalike. I want to tell you who I am. I want to show myself to you. The novel I wrote is, in part, about the erotics of translation. The central plot is concerned with the love affair between two young people who fall for one another when they realize that they understand one another’s languages well enough to bring a baroque poem from Spanish to English together. But I’m well aware that I enjoy these exchanges because I remain a colonial subject. Remember what I was saying earlier about how the key to the history of North America can be found in the fact that people like me can be seen as both white and not-white, colonizers and colonized? That’s because the Mexican creoles—the term with which the colonial caste system designated the descendants of Spaniards born in the Americas—have always served the same social function: translating, informing on, explaining the colonies to the imperial elite. Translators are often lovers, but they’re also always traitors.
In my defense, I’m far from the only Mexican writer to betray his country by translating it into the language of the empire. The origins of Mexican literature are to be found in the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Letters of Relation, the prose chronicles that inform the Spanish court of what was going on in the colonies. Nothing much has changed since then, and that’s what’s painful: the extent to which this pleasurable treason that I committed isn’t the organic consequence of the particularities of my life, but of imperial soft power.
While the novel has yet to be published in Spanish, I worry that writing about what it feels like to realize you’ve been raised from the cradle to explain Mexico to Americans might make my project illegible for some Mexican readers, and not only because I chose to write in English, but also because the discursive field of the novel is thoroughly American. Nobody in Mexico would ever doubt that I’m white, so my attempt to tease out why some Ameicans insist on the contrary might not make much sense in the Mexican context. So, to finally answer your question: I’m not sure if I succeeded in explaining Mexico to the Americans—in fact I would beg them to remember that my book is a novel, not a work of history—but I like to think that I succeeded in ironizing my desire to please them by writing my informative report on the colonies in the form of a novel about a character who realizes he’s been conditioned to desire America—Americanness, Americans—even in the face of heartbreak. As for the people in Mexico who might be suspicious of my project, I hope they will trust me when I say that the book is, precisely, about the impossibility of translation.
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Author photograph by Santiago Mohar Volkow
