La discapacidad, tema de la agenda pública en México.

en que la gente bebia cafés destenidos el la sala de espera, mi mayor problema se llamaba John Lloyd Stephens’ (p. 30). After giving an outline o f the adventures, discoveries and general heroism o f Stephens and the artist Frederic Catherwood on their journeys to explore the archaeological sites o f the Yucatan peninsula, recorded in Incidents o f Travel in Yucatan (1843), Villoro indicates that as a ‘cronista posterior’ the best he can hope for is to look for traces of Stephens (and Catherwood) in Y ucatan, rather than o f the ancient Mayans themselves:

De las muchas cosas que vio [Stephens], la que màs le intri go fue una pequena mano roja que se repetfa en grutas, templos, casas y pirâmides. Acaso por ser una marca tan modesta, la mano roja le hacia pensar en la grandeza de los antiguos moradores de Uxmal, Labnâ y Chichén Itzâ. Y o iba a viajar con la misma sensaciôn de desmesura. Entre las manos rojas de los mayas siempre vena la sombra de Stephens, (p. 31)

Just as Stephens imagined the images o f the red hands as ‘w elcom e’ signs which brought the past into contact w ith his present, V illoro finds the m ass-produced cop ies o f Catherwood’s engravings as w elcom e signs in his hotel bedroom in Merida (p. 35); a ubiquitous icon of a past age of adventure travel in Yucatan.

A s a ‘cronista posterior’ to Stephens and Catherwood, and to the many illustrious travel- writers who have written on Yucatan since (Sir Eric S. Thompson and others), Villoro formats his descriptions o f ‘places o f interest’ as a commentary on previous texts and drawings. Typically, ‘places o f interest’ rarely live up to the expectations created by the ‘Grandes Viajeros’: ‘Las delicadas configuraciones que habia visto en los grabados de Catherwood carecian de relieve bajo el sol acuchillante’ (p. 115). Reality is continually mediated, displaced by these authoritative texts. Villoro does not see the monuments themselves so much as their potential for future appropriations:

En Sayil presencié una escena que c^tura la situaciôn de los mayas actuales. Un artesano tallaba algo que anunciô como caoba y parecia triplay, pero lo sorprendente no era el material sino el m odelo que usaba: juna reproducciôn en un libro de Sir Eric S. Thompson! Supongo que asf se cierra el circulo antropolôgico: el estudioso como objeto de estudio de los estudiados. (p. 112)

For Villoro the interplay o f texts and engravings is the reality o f contemporary Yucatan. Villoro is not particularly critical of Stephens and Catherwood’s travels. Indeed, it would be difficult: Stephens’s account o f Yucatan is extremely well-informed on an encyclopaedic range o f subjects concerning the peninsula, and remarkably liberal for the work o f a barely ‘post-colonial’ travel-writer. He is admittedly com plicit with colonial institutions such as slavery in that he ‘quite naturally’ uses the Mayan Indians to carry both him self and his luggage, and he also presences scenes o f peons being disciplined with anthropological

sangfroid, but he does record the situation, and the m assive success o f his writing did contribute to knowledge and action on ‘human rights abuses’ in Yucatan. Certainly Justo Sierra O ’R eilly’s almost immediate translation o f the chronicle (2 vols, 1848 and 1850 respectively) was at pains to try to cover up Stephens’ s revelations o f the darker side of life

in Yucatan (Palmeras, p. 71).

Villoro, too, is concerned to reveal the harsher ‘realities’ of present-day life for the Mayan communities o f Yucatan, not just reiterate the past glory o f their ancestors as evidenced by the ruins. Stephens is thus a positive role m odel, although his passage through the peninsula has inevitably turned even the present-day M ayans into a sim ulacra o f themselves, and authentic ‘reality’ is thus even more scarce. But Villoro uses this example o f an annotated text to underscore the transitory and only partial authority o f all travel- chronicles, his included ( ‘De manera semejante, estas cronicas podrian estar enmendadas por algun parroquiano del Express’ (p. 72)). There is a process o f transculturation at work: the Yucatecans simultaneously absorb and distort the text o f their ‘reality’. This process continues in the era o f mass tourism: the intertextual presence o f Stephens and Catherwood highlights the on-going machinations o f the tourist industry, revealing the constructed nature o f all claims to knowledge and reality.

This travel ‘in the footsteps o f is Villoro’s ‘estilo de viaje’. It does not take the form of an h isto rica lly accurate reenactm ent o f S tep h en s’s journey or o f a con scien tio u s chronologically-ordered retracing of steps with a view to ‘discovering’ fresh data about the traveller or his circumstances. Ironically, V illoro’s actual style o f travel is informed by Stephens’s in its acknowledgement o f its shortcomings: the potential drama o f running out o f petrol on the road to Teabo, the potential torch ligh t exploration o f the caves at Loi tun, the potential encounter with the cockroach in Merida. His literary style is more obviously informed in its plea for linear temporality, a narrative style which advances apace with displacement, and ‘ good-old’ story-telling. In so doing, it reveals a sense o f resignation and an embedded ‘ post’ -consciousness within the contemporary chronicler; at the same time as an awareness that the real journey, the real game, is indeed through literature, not ‘reality’. It is a nod to the impossibility of completely original contemporary travel-writing.

Nevertheless, Villoro also attempts to counterbalance the weight of such grand intertexts of travel-writing with his own historiographical reconstructions o f the itineraries o f undervalued Y ucatecans; Yucatecans w ho dem onstrate their adaptability to new , postmodern circumstances.

America

One o f Hinojosa’s quotations from Baudrillard concerns Disneyland and the film studios: he uses Baudrillard’s comments on the symbolic status o f Disneyland and the Hollywood film studios as an epigraph to his chapter on his visits to studios and theme parks: ‘If you believe that the w hole o f the Western world is hypostatized in Am erica, the w hole of America in California, and California in MGM and Disneyland, then this is the microcosm o f the W est’ .28 Hinojosa thus uses Baudrillard to support his interpretation o f mainstream America, and especially o f the organised touristic experience.

Later in the chapter, Hinojosa also comments that, ‘Los Universal Studios son una ciudad confeccionada para los amantes del cine, siempre y cuando no hayan llegado a la edad critica de la adolescencia’ (p. 42); and, ‘Padecimos, en el metro inexistente de Los Angeles, un terremoto y una inmensa cabezota de King Kong que amenazo con asustam os’ (p. 48). Here there is no reference to Baudrillard, yet America contains the following statements:

In fact what you are presented with in the studios is the degeneration o f the cinematographic illusion, its mockery, just as what is offered in Disneyland is a parody of the world of the imagination. The sumptuous age of stars and images is reduced to a few artificial tornado effects, pathetic fake buildings, and childish tricks which the crowd pretends to be taken in by to avoid feeling too disappointed, (pp. 55/56)

Even the blueprint for Hinojosa’s playful mise-en-abime verbal constructions ( ‘amenazo con asustamos’) can be found in Baudrillard ( ‘pretends to be taken in by’).

Baudrillard continues his analysis:

The American city seems to have stepped right out of the movies. To grasp its secret, you should not, then, begin with the city and move inwards to the screen; you should begin with the screen and move outwards to the city. It is there that cinema does not assume an exceptional form, but simply invests the streets and the entire town with a mythical atmosphere, (p. 56)

Hinojosa follow s suit:

Sin embargo, si el cine es capaz de trascender la vida, no es alli precisamente, en los Universal Studios, donde esta trascendencia se gesta. El cine se vive en las calles, que si tienen la fuerza espontanea de remedar la ficciôn cinematogrâfica, y no en el proposito infantilizador de los empresarios que venden mediocres hamburguesas servidos en platos que ostentan el rostro de Eliot Ness. (p. 43)

This quote-for-quote saga could c o n t i n u e . 29 W ithout doubt, H inojosa is plagiarising Baudrillard, not word for word, but rather in terms o f his ideas. Perhaps the pressure to say something new in his travel-chronicle has put too much pressure on Hinojosa’s artistic integrity.

However, Fabienne Bradu, writing in 1987, predicted that,

Francisco Hinojosa no inventa temas, situaciones, estilos, géneros: los toma de una tradiciôn y los explota descaradamente, al tiempo que imprime un sello suyo en esos tipos de “remake”.

Faltaria poco para que Francisco Hinojosa hiciera suya la actitud postmodema de trabajar ünicamente a partir de y sobre “revivals”, mezcla de canibalismo y de b u r l a .3 0

H inojosa’s plagiarism m ight perhaps be recouped as a postmodern extrapolation o f intertextuality, set in his cynical style o f cannibalism and mockery. Thus he is furnished with ready-made content without having to fully acknowledge intertextual dependency: in the mere act o f rewriting, Hinojosa makes the text his own. (He later refers to him self as a Pierre Menard figure (p. 108).) Villoro also comments that his text sometimes employs the technique o f ‘pavo huido’ (p. 191), a Yucatecan dish where the turkey has been removed and only the stuffing is left. What content fills his chronicle is not necessarily his own, but the stories o f ‘native informants’ w hose nam es have often been omitted.3i It is the acceptable face o f plagiarism today.

Nevertheless there is an important sense in which Hinojosa distinguishes him self from Baudrillard rather than simply absorbs him. Hinojosa cites Baudrillard’s claim that, ‘If you get out o f your car in this centrifugal metropolis, you immediately becom e a delinquent’ .32 Baudrillard goes on to make explicit an ethnic slant on pedestrianism in Los Angeles:

As soon as you start walking, you are a threat to public order, like a dog wandering in the road. Only immigrants from the Third World are allowed to walk. It is, in a sense, their privilege, a privilege that goes along with that of occupying the empty hearts of the big cities. For other people, walking, fatigue, or muscular activity have become rare commodities, ‘services’ costing a lot o f money. [...] The signs o f the most utter poverty always have at least a chance of becoming fashionable, (p. 58)

Baudrillard’s ironic reversal o f the question o f privilege is what occupies Hinojosa, and possibly affects his ‘style’ o f travel: Hinojosa ostensibly sets out on the trip to test whether travelling without access to private transport in Los A ngeles is possible, fashionable and/or a specific means o f access to his target community. He tries to experience grass-roots Chicano life, although, in a sense, his success can only be partial: he has access to monies

29 See also their parallel descriptions of freeways (AAW^rica, p. 53; Un taxi, p. 19), and Baudrillard’s discussion of ‘anorexic culture’ versus Hinojosa’s ‘cultura light' {America, pp. 39/40; Un taxi, pp. 70-72). 30 ‘Trivio en la narrativa mexicana’, 48.

31 In particular he depends on the local historians Rodolfo Ruz Menéndez and José Luis Sierra (p. 179 & p. 189, respectively).

32 America, p. 58; Un taxi, p. 35. Villoro also makes a potential reference to Baudrillard’s definitive

expression of Los Angeles in his statement that, ‘En Los Angeles, donde el simple hecho de caminar es un signo de fracaso, no puede haber nada mas deprimente que un recorrido de muchas cuadras rumbo a una extraeconômica lavanderia coreana’, with a hole in one’s boot {Pahneras, p. 172). Villoro follows this with the information that such ‘failures’ are referred to in Los Angeles with a pseudo-Spanish term: ‘desperados’.

which allow him entry into the United States by air, rather than via the R io Grande; which allow him to stay in a hotel; and which allow him to take taxis whenever possible. Many other factors also affect his ‘image’ and life-‘style’ in Los Angeles: he does not look latino, he does not look particularly poor, and he is not looking for work.

Hinojosa claims that he is not trying to be fashionable by touring downtown Los A ngeles on foot: he is simply caught out by Los A ngeles’ cultural extremism (sink or swim , drive or walk). Yet, by turning this experience of limbo into the leitmotif o f his chronicle he also finds a way to introduce a sense o f belligerent ‘Third World m entality’ to counter Baudrillard’s experience. Even if Baudrillard claim s that travel on foot is getting to be fashionable in Los Angeles, Hinojosa tries to show that the ‘realities’ are not so romantic,33 and where Baudrillard subsequently sticks to driving him self round L os A ngeles and environs as the only way to experience the ‘Gigantic, spontaneous spectacle o f automotive traffic. A total collective act, staged by the entire population, twenty-four hours a day’ (p. 52), Hinojosa goes ‘out o f his w ay’ to point out that it is not the entire population o f Los Angeles which has full access to the American way o f life.

Douglas Kellner, in his Jean Baudrillard: From Marxism to Postm odernism and Beyond,

notes that,

Baudrillard comes to California, and he sees the natural splendor o f the desert and the eccentricities of its joggers, intellectuals, yuppies and freeway and media culture. His California is lily-white, Reaganized and yuppified. There are no migrant farm workers, no Chicano barrios, no Central American refugees, no Vietnamese refugees or Asians, not even any blacks. Baudrillard hears that mental asylums have released some o f their patients and sees some of them wandering in the streets; he does not, however, see the homeless, the hopeless underclass, so evident in the Reagan era, and does not mention that it is very specific political policies that have produced this suffering in the interest of a specific class o f i n d i v i d u a l s . 3 4

Hinojosa arguably does try to contest this wall-eyed vision o f Los A ngeles by focusing on Chicanos and hom eless people. Ultimately he balks at Baudrillard’s postmodern style of travel: Baudrillard’s text on Los A ngeles may be inescapable, but Hinojosa finds ways to use and abuse this monolith of postmodern travel-writing in his insidious intertext.

* * * * *

33 Al Morales notes that the experience of taxis in Los Angeles - the lack of them - was Hinojosa’s only experience of unmediated reality (p. 134).