{"id":116,"date":"2026-07-30T20:28:56","date_gmt":"2026-07-31T01:28:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lacisreview.lacis.wisc.edu\/?p=116"},"modified":"2026-08-20T18:46:27","modified_gmt":"2026-08-20T23:46:27","slug":"erotics-of-the-border-compulsions-of-the-self-grappling-with-luisa-josefina-hernandez","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lacisreview.lacis.wisc.edu\/?p=116","title":{"rendered":"Erotics of the Border, Compulsions of the Self: Grappling with Luisa Josefina Hern\u00e1ndez"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Erotics of the Border, Compulsions of the Self: Grappling with Luisa Josefina Hern\u00e1ndez<\/h1><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Arturo Ruiz-Mautino<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
\"Ornate
“Witness to a Silent Prayer.” Image of a Buddha looking down from the exterior of a building. Mexico City, Mexico. August, 2022. Image by Lu Han. Copyright Lu Han, 2022.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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The question of the border as a question of genre is no new affair for the examination of the symbolic and discursive affordances of the former. Already in 1987, Gloria Anzald\u00faa turned to ethno-poetics as a field that was capable of refining the relationship between literary discursivity and her theorization of the border. Thus, while she observed that \u201cThe ability of the story (prose and poetry) to transform the storyteller and the listener into something or someone else is shamanistic\u201d (Anzald\u00faa 66 et passim), it was to clear to her that to speak of prose and poetry at the border implicated a specific injunction for theory\u2014a move away, so to speak, from Western aesthetics, or, at the very least, a certain thorough tension. The problem resurfaces in the review of 20th century Mexican writing that engages with the border in ways that could be deemed traditional, that is, in ways that are all too familiar to a sense of poetics that does not necessarily manifest the stylistic influx that the issue carried for someone like Anzald\u00faa. A problem of genre, in other words, as a problem of apparent reference and apparent distance, but which still demands a fair amount of attention, particularly when\u2014as Ericka Beckman has argued very recently\u2014even modes of writing as consolidated as literary realism elicit the suspicion of newer-yet-old forms of reading Latin American modernities (69-70). In that sense, almost two decades after Castillo and Tabuenca C\u00f3rdoba contended for the de-metaphorization of the border on the Mexican side of it, retaining, in turn, the materiality that eluded its U.S.-based commentary, the task of reading the realist work of Luisa Josefina Hern\u00e1ndez\u2014in particular, the work that posits that the historico-national border is prone both to routinary acts of metaphorization and the not-that-ordinary game of psychologism\u2014may hold some importance for literary history and the problems of poetics dwelling within.

But why Hern\u00e1ndez and why the border? If we insist on imagining borders, like Heidegger did, as \u201cnot that at which something stops but, as the Greeks recognized\u2026[as] that from which something begins its presencing<\/em>\u201d (154),\u00a0 we might consider that the realism of Hern\u00e1ndez is all about the act of presencing, of laying bare that which persists behind the alleged transparency of realist imagination. And, while her work can hardly befit the labels of \u201cborder writing\u201d or \u201cliterature of the northern border,\u201d a material sentiment concomitant with said subsets of the written permeates the travel logs, diaries, itineraries, and found letters that constitute her novels. It seems to me that the commentary on Hern\u00e1ndez is betrayed by a false security with respect to the ultimate horizon of her preferred themes and endeavors, and that such reductionism is to be done away if one ought to envision the radical potential of her realist undertakings.

Luisa Josefina Hern\u00e1ndez\u2019s work spans several decades of scrutiny of Mexican modernity, from the early years of the Second Federal Republic until her passing in 2023. All throughout her more than fifteen novels, there is a tendency to thwart thematic reductions. For instance, Las confesiones <\/em>[The Confessions<\/em>, 2020], one of her last novels, disguises itself as a semi-autofictional take on the problem of sincerity, while characterizing in superbly eloquent fashion the challenges that mid-century Mexico held for the autonomy of female literary writing. The novel that interests me the most now is Los palacios desiertos <\/em>[The Deserted Palaces<\/em>, 1963]. In it, Hern\u00e1ndez explores the effects of border imagination upon a form as old as the psychological-detective novel, without abandoning her fidelity to the well-known tactics of continuous introspection, meandering descriptions, and a modernist faith in psychological profundity: in Hern\u00e1ndez\u2019s words, the quest for \u201chonesty,\u201d for \u201cfamily, political or interior truths\u201d (Molina 41).\u00a0

Critics of Hern\u00e1ndez have repeatedly observed that her novels delve into questions of ethics while considering the themes of love and self-destruction, amounting to a modality of realism that privileges psychological complexity over any sort of political critique.<\/strong>1<\/a><\/sup>

<\/strong>And this is true, at least to some extent, as Hern\u00e1ndez\u2019s characters often find themselves in situations that demand from them to go through the ordeal of never-ending autoanalysis, pushing the historical to a background rather tempting for critics to dismiss. This is the case with most of Hern\u00e1ndez\u2019s novels up to the late-sixties, when her work evinced an increased interest in social history and the shortcomings of Mexican institutions. But even before that, Los palacios desiertos<\/em> ought to be considered.

There is a corpse at the center of Los palacios desiertos<\/em>: the body of Rob Marlon, an American letraherido<\/em>, both a painter and a writer, who once set out to try his luck south of the border and wended his way into the lives of Elena Gonzaga and Luis, the narrator of the novel\u2014both Mexicans, both enthralled by Marlon\u2019s tragic eccentricity. Marlon was 33 at the time of his suicide, with which the story begins. He was both the narrator\u2019s neighbor and Gonzaga\u2019s lover. He is somewhat shaped after Lowry\u2019s Geoffrey Firmin, the Consul from Under the Volcano<\/em>. And he is, like Gonzaga and Luis, most prominently a reader, to whom the question of the border\u2014of migration and rootlessness\u2014befalls any consideration of writing.

Some might see in Los palacios desiertos<\/em> a fable that inversely mirrors Rulfo\u2019s \u201cPaso del Norte,\u201d published ten years earlier. However, while the author of El llano en llamas<\/em>, who reviewed Hern\u00e1ndez\u2019s novel shortly after its publication,2<\/a><\/sup> inscribed a tale of sonhood within the crevices of the Odyssean trajectory, ruminating on the border as a locus of violence, Hern\u00e1ndez\u2019s novel is all about absences and the queries they prompt. Marlon\u2019s corpse at its frontispiece does not set off an investigation akin to that of a detective novel, whereby, if we are to believe Jameson\u2019s outcry, the organicity of the artwork is superseded by the fetishization of the ending (Jameson 132). Luis\u2019 investigation (\u201cwhy did Marlon commit suicide?\u201d) is structured as a sequence of readings, each of which provides us with complementary pieces of the jigsaw: the reading of Elena\u2019s diaries, of Marlon\u2019s unpublished novel, of the narrator\u2019s harrowing testimony. Yet there is no point in subordinating them to a final revelation, be it that Elena Gonzaga\u2019s allegorical analysis of Marlon\u2019s psychology triggered his suicide, be it that the task of analysis may only encounter ghosts behind the facades of the quotidian.

There is no point in doing that because Los palacios desiertos<\/em> introduces its readers into a hall of mirrors wherein any key to their distortion solicits the consideration of the border as both a material and a psycho-symbolic reality. Its most reified version renders the novel a sequence of discursive strata, so that the Heideggerian act of presencing<\/em> is only possible once the border is fully granted the status of both psychosexual metaphor and figure of melancholy. Its psycho-symbolic dimension makes itself felt through the assumption that what Anzald\u00faa called shamanistic may not be apt for everyone: the body resting at the center of the novel, the body of Rob Marlon, attests to the fact that letting oneself be \u201ctransformed by the storyteller into something or someone else\u201d may carry unforeseeable effects. Whatever figure of duplicity, whatever dyadic setting impinging upon a theory of language or the text, can be traced back to the effects of the border Rob Marlon has crossed\u2014the border that infuses the novel with a peculiar sense of the tragic, as Rob Marlon never stops seeing himself as \u201cA frightened North American who sees in Mexico, not the city, but the desert where he seeks himself\u201d (Hern\u00e1ndez 57).3<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\"Head-and-shoulders<\/figure>
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About the Author<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Arturo Ruiz-Mautino<\/strong> is a PhD Candidate in Spanish at Cornell University. His current project studies the emergence of posthumanist ways of thinking about the works of memory in contemporary Latin American fiction. Drawing from memory studies, fiction theory, animal studies, and critical posthumanities, he is working on a transregional genealogy delving into contemporary literary production from Mexico, the Andean region, and the Southern Cone. His most recent publications deal with philosophy of technology, Iberian Medieval poetics, and 20th century Mexican literary realism. He received his BA and licenciatura from Pontificia Universidad Cat\u00f3lica del Per\u00fa and his MA from Cornell University.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n

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Notes<\/h3>\n\n\n
  1. See, for instance, Elsa Margarita Saucedo\u2019s dissertation from 1990 (still one of the most ambitious studies of Hern\u00e1ndez\u2019s narrative work), in which Saucedo studies Hern\u00e1ndez\u2019s existentialism alongside her paradoxical approach to feminist discourse, whereby inquiries into individual freedom seem to overshadow historical concerns. \u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/li>
  2. In Rulfo\u2019s brief review he opines that Hern\u00e1ndez\u2019s novel \u201cdemonstrates the efficiency of her method of analyzing characters, for apparently antagonistic personalities are nevertheless united in the same frustrating existence\u201d (294).
    \u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/li>
  3. \u201cUn norteamericano aterrorizado que ve en M\u00e9xico, no la ciudad, sino el desierto donde se persigue a s\u00ed mismo\u201d (Hern\u00e1ndez 57). Translation is mine. \u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/li><\/ol>\n\n\n

    Works Cited<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

    Anzald\u00faa, Gloria. Borderlands \/ La Frontera: The New Mestiza.<\/em> Aunt Lute, 1987.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    Beckman, Ericka. \u201cThe Historical Novel in Peru: Jos\u00e9 Mar\u00eda Arguedas\u2019 Yawar Fiesta<\/em>.\u201d Mediations<\/em>, vol. 33, no. 1-2, 2020, pp. 69-84.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    Castillo, Debra A., and Mar\u00eda Socorro Tabuenca C\u00f3rdoba. Border Women: Writing from La Frontera<\/em>. The U of Minnesota P, 2002.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    Heidegger, Martin. \u201cBuilding Dwelling Thinking.\u201d Poetry, Language, Thought. <\/em>Translated by and with an Introduction by Albert Hoftstadter. Harper & Row, 1971, pp. 145-61.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    Hern\u00e1ndez, Luisa Josefina. Los palacios desiertos<\/em>. M\u00e9xico D. F., Joaqu\u00edn Mortiz, 1963.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    Jameson, Frederic. \u201cReification and Utopia in Mass Culture.\u201d Social Text<\/em>, no. 1, 1979, pp. 130-48.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    Molina, Javier. \u201cLuisa Josefina Hern\u00e1ndez: una obra pr\u00f3diga.\u201d Tramoya<\/em>, no. 12-3, October-December 1987, pp. 40-2.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    Rulfo, Juan. Review of Los palacios desiertos<\/em>, by Luisa Josefina Hern\u00e1ndez. Books Abroad<\/em>, vol. 38, no. 3, 1964, pp. 294.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    Saucedo, Elsa Margarita. Las Tres Etapas en la Narrativa de Luisa Josefina Hern\u00e1ndez (1959-1980): Una Perspectiva Feminista<\/em>. 1990. U of California Irvine, PhD Dissertation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    \n\n\n
    border<\/a>, <\/span>identity<\/a>, <\/span>literature<\/a>, <\/span>Mexico<\/a><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Arturo Ruiz-Mautino The question of the border as a question of genre is no new affair for the examination of the symbolic and discursive affordances of the former. Already in 1987, Gloria Anzald\u00faa turned to ethno-poetics as a field that was capable of refining the relationship between literary discursivity and her theorization of the border. …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3828,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_uw_seo_meta_title":"","_uw_seo_meta_description":"","_uw_seo_twitter_card_type":"summary_large_image","_uw_seo_meta_image":"","_uw_seo_meta_image_url":"","_uw_seo_meta_image_sizes":[],"_uw_seo_custom_meta_tags":[],"uw_external_link":"","footnotes":"[{\"id\":\"15dc4af2-6d46-4bb8-83e2-8b58e49095d4\",\"content\":\"See, for instance, Elsa Margarita Saucedo\\u2019s dissertation from 1990 (still one of the most ambitious studies of Hern\\u00e1ndez\\u2019s narrative work), in which Saucedo studies Hern\\u00e1ndez\\u2019s existentialism alongside her paradoxical approach to feminist discourse, whereby inquiries into individual freedom seem to overshadow historical concerns.\"},{\"id\":\"48316dc0-9f24-40fd-a0d4-2c7880180fc6\",\"content\":\"In Rulfo\\u2019s brief review he opines that Hern\\u00e1ndez\\u2019s novel \\u201cdemonstrates the efficiency of her method of analyzing characters, for apparently antagonistic personalities are nevertheless united in the same frustrating existence\\u201d (294).
    \"},{\"id\":\"e553c076-a5d7-4e6f-a8c1-f1570d068264\",\"content\":\"\\u201cUn norteamericano aterrorizado que ve en M\\u00e9xico, no la ciudad, sino el desierto donde se persigue a s\\u00ed mismo\\u201d (Hern\\u00e1ndez 57). Translation is mine.\"}]"},"categories":[38],"tags":[41,83,36,17],"class_list":["post-116","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-issue-2-fall-winter-2023","tag-border","tag-identity","tag-literature","tag-mexico"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lacisreview.lacis.wisc.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/116","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lacisreview.lacis.wisc.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lacisreview.lacis.wisc.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lacisreview.lacis.wisc.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3828"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lacisreview.lacis.wisc.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=116"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/lacisreview.lacis.wisc.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/116\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":983,"href":"https:\/\/lacisreview.lacis.wisc.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/116\/revisions\/983"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lacisreview.lacis.wisc.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=116"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lacisreview.lacis.wisc.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=116"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lacisreview.lacis.wisc.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=116"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}