Resumen

SOTELO GUTIERREZ, César Antonio. History, parody and intertextuality to narrate the end of the revolutionary utopia: Pedro Ángel Palou’s Tierra roja. La novela de Lázaro Cárdenas. Relac. Estud. hist. soc. [online]. 2023, vol.44, n.175, pp.96-111.  Epub 06-Nov-2023. ISSN 2448-7554.  https://doi.org/10.24901/rehs.v44i175.980.

The failure of the national project, after two hundred years of independent life, has made it necessary to search in all areas for the causes of the social, economic, and political collapse that Mexico is experiencing. Hence the importance that the historical novel has today, which uses fiction to study the past, to present answers to the problems of the present.

With Tierra Roja. La novela de Lázaro Cárdenas Pedro Ángel Palou reviews the historical moment in which an attempt was made to build the Mexican nation, turning the utopia of the revolution into a political project: building a more just society. The fiction develops a process of humanization of Lázaro Cárdenas, the president who wanted to fulfill the revolutionary goals by instituting a series of reforms that he was unable to firmly consolidate, so few of his conquests and ideals have survived into this century.

The novel does not magnify the myth of the hero but presents a man with his fears, contradictions, desires, and dreams. Thus, fiction portrays a country in search of direction, whose destiny did not depend only on the decisions of its president, but on the numerous actions of the actants of an effervescent social construct: peasants, workers, businessmen, politicians, journalists, artists.

To generate this overall vision, the narrative structure established by Palou merges two of the most popular genres in contemporary narrative, history and crime fiction, and supports both discourses in parody and intertextuality to create a postmodern novel that invites the reader to get involved in a playful exercise where history and fiction are confused, contradicted and complemented, a fable that revolves around the figure of a warlord, but which gives voice to anonymous beings who are also part of the story, to show that a single man cannot change a society that does not actively participate in solving its problems.

Palabras llave : Lázaro Cárdenas; Mexican Revolution; Parody; Intertextuality; Historical Novel.

        · resumen en Español     · texto en Español     · Español ( pdf )