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An Archeology of Mexican Modernity

Cultural analysts have noted similarities between Alfonso Cuarón’s Colonia Roma and José Emilio Pacheco’s Colonia Roma, depicted twenty years earlier in his best-selling novel Las batallas en el desierto (1981). But no one has examined how Pacheco’s work studies the emerging relationship between modernization and the racialization of space, which Cuarón’s film Roma later captured for a global audience. Pacheco’s depictions of a spatialized interaction between social classes in mid-twentieth-century Colonia Roma, I argue, offer an archeology of space, race, class, and modernity that attempts to counteract forces of social amnesia following a period of repression and censorship. Drawing on the critical practice of spatial studies, I look beyond the flat representation of space and study instead how a multidimensional spatialization depicted in this work reveals the legacy of Spanish colonial infrastructures of race and the emerging formulation of modernity. Indeed, Pacheco’s novel tells the story of repressed memories and unearths the infrastructures of a coloniality/modernity that continue to affect Mexico today.