Carlos Martínez Assad explores the Mexico of Arreola and Rulfo

In his novel The promised heaven and the much feared hell (Ediciones BonArt, 2024), historian Carlos Martínez Assad seeks the roots of that Mexico linked to authors such as Juan José Arreola or Juan Rulfo. “That province that is mentioned so much, however, from which we increasingly distance ourselves from the avalanche of the city world, the urban world, which is more attractive for many writers.

“For me, on the other hand, it is like taking refuge in that province of Ramón López Velarde, of those authors who are the classics of Mexican literature, despite the fact that these spaces are increasingly separated from current Mexicans. Despite everything, the contradiction exists, because now we return to Pedro Paramo through a film streaming. We return to these places that are deeply rooted in the national consciousness; that is, the search for what was happening in that area of ​​the country, especially in the 50s and 60s of the last century, definitive in terms of the processes that are experienced in Mexico.”

However, Martínez Assad continues, the town mentioned in the novel, San Pancho, is a place that resists change, because The Church continues to set the pace for all this, from movies that must be seen or the education that children must have.. This, then, is a novel that takes a turn towards that world that He seems lost although he is not so lost, because, at the end of the day, that of the Mexican is a sum of identities that contribute elements to the formation of national consciousness. Not necessarily a single way of perceiving reality, but rather several elements that come together, which we constantly construct and reconstruct..

A child who has read too much

The protagonist of The promised heaven and the much feared hell is a boy between six and 12 years old, a resident of the Mexican Bajío, a region of Catholicism very exacerbatedand how he faces religious teaching. a small with many fears regarding what may be right and what may be wrong. That he has read too much, because he knows the history of the Apocalypse, he reads the newspapers, he sees what is happening in the world with communism, because it is a time in which all anti-communist propaganda is unleashed; is confronted with the normality of now. Every day we read about wars everywhere, mass murders; However, people are no longer moved.

This is not a novel, let’s say, of action. The author cannot deny his interest in history, in culture, on a general level. Perhaps one of the biggest problems is how to make the fictional win in the story. I call it a novel, because, without a doubt, there is a lot of imagination in the character, in what he sees, that finally existed, or exists, so that the Guanajuato of the 50s can be seen, in particular. But, what was also the country, because much of national life takes place through that child character: the arrival of television, the departure of the braceros, the memory of the Cristeros.

From his first novel –In the summer, the earth (Seix Barral, 2014)–, the sociologist and researcher has avoided fall into these formulas of passionate love. In this book, “the main characters don’t even have names – the most influential figures do – because in the end it is a portrait of the society of that time.”

A series of pictorial works, especially of a religious nature, play a role in the novel. It is a coincidence that I would have known the paintings I am talking about as a child. I saw them at my parents’ friends’ houses and they impressed me. They were houses of everyday life, but they had many of these images. When Raquel Tibol or Octavio Paz made the painter Hermenegildo Bustos (1832-1907) famous, I had already known him for many years..

Martínez Assad, however, recovers the native artist from Purísima del Rincón, Guanajuato, for today as part of the environment of that time: I also highlight the interest that Bustos had in Holy Week and everything religious. He made masks for the representation of the Passion. It is said that he designed several of those that still exist in this town.

The promised heaven and the much feared hell It will be presented on a date to be confirmed at the Jesús Reyes Heroles House of Culture (Francisco Sosa 202, Coyoacán).