I had thought about spending my International Placement Year in Mexico as far back as 2019, when I was not yet a student at Lancaster University and a global pandemic had confined me to Chadderton in Northwest England. I made the suggestion to my parents only half-seriously, and they advised against it: Mexico seemed to us like a distant, dangerous country. Even so, I was excited by the prospect of spending a year there.

In my first year of university, I read John Charles Chasteen’s Born in Blood and Fire. Over the Michaelmas vacation a continent I had never thought much about became a source of cultural and political fascination, a place where Indigenous, European and African civilisations blended and revolutions were as plentiful as the silver and gold hauled out of the mountains. It was learning about the Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional of Southern Chiapas at the end of Lent that refocussed my gaze on Mexico. In 1994 the peasants of that region occupied San Cristóbal de Las Casas along with other highland towns and declared their struggle for justice and equality before retreating back to their autonomously governed communities. Going to Mexico now became an opportunity to see this alternative form of political organisation in action.

I was exposed to the Mexican Revolution and Juan Rulfo’s writing in the Latin American culture module of my second year. Rulfo was a Mexican author, photographer and ex-tire salesmen whose one novel and collection of short stories are lauded as achievements in world literature. I understood little from my first read through of his short story, ‘El Llano en Llamas’: characters speaking in an often-incomprehensible dialect of Spanish tripped from one ultraviolent episode into another, passing through a dissociative landscape of sierras and llanos. The sense of alienation created by the text compelled me to understand it better. It was only after analysing and translating excerpts for an essay that the fog began to clear. Those first translated excerpts were in a standard, lucid English which I felt didn’t quite capture the tone of the original narration. Around this time, I had found out that one of my lecturers, Cornelia Gräbner, had connections with an archive in Mexico City called the Centro Académico de la Memoria de Nuestra América that wanted interns to help them catalogue the documents, articles and books in their care.

Working at the CAMeNA gave me a better education in modern Latin American history than any degree could offer. My first job was reading and summarising documents from the Fondo H, which dealt with State Crimes. Those written summaries would then be added to the CAMeNA’s online reference system so that researchers will have an easier time finding the newspaper articles, legal documents or letters relevant to their own work. The majority of the documents I read came from Argentina during and after the Dirty War. From 1974 to 1983 Argentina was under an arguably fascistic civic-military dictatorship in which suspected leftists were kidnapped, tortured and killed on a massive scale in clandestine detention centres. Families of the victims fought for justice during and after the dictatorship. Most of the Argentine documents I studied were only accessible online because they were a critical resource in a prosecution case that continues to this day. Whilst learning about this chapter of Argentine history I was hearing reports from the UK: that plans were being made to imprison would-be immigrants on ships, peaceful protest was being criminalised, the demands of striking workers were not being met, and the climate crisis was being ignored. I began to imagine the Latin American revolutions I had read about taking place in a UK that through climate change and internal strife had been transformed into an apocalyptic landscape not unlike the revolutionary Jalisco I had read about in ‘Llano’. The imaginary revolutionaries that sprang from this landscape naturally came from the most economically deprived parts of the country, many of which happen to be in the Northwest. I decided then that the language of the translation should reflect one of the dialects spoken there.

Working and living in Mexico deepened my understanding of global power relations in a way that a year abroad in Spain could not. I began to appreciate the extent of the control that the United States and other countries in the Global North have over Central and South America. The documents I read at the CAMeNA made apparent that the US lent training and funds not just to the Argentine military but to various other right-wing dictatorships across the Americas to combat left-wing governments. US influence is not just political but also corporate. Most corner shops in CDMX are part of the OXXO chain. OXXO is owned by Coca-Cola FEMSA, a Mexican company that independently bottles soft drinks on behalf of Coca Cola. Coca-Cola FEMSA owns and operates a bottling plant in Chiapas and extracts upwards of 1 million litres of water per day from the state’s wells and aquifers. Meanwhile the people of Chiapas must buy bottled water from elsewhere, or drink Coca-Cola. My work colleagues and friends in CDMX told me that by 2030 Mexico would run out of potable water. Hopefully Coke will still be in plentiful supply. In the UK an attempt to stop water companies from dumping raw sewage into rivers and the sea has been voted down.

My (and my parents’) initial assumptions about Mexico were proven incorrect. CDMX, like any other capital city, has its safe and unsafe areas. Crowds have pickpockets and public transport is often crowded. Being a white man there was little risk of me being sexually assaulted or disappeared, but a higher level of vigilance was still necessary than would be in the UK. I learned this the hard way when my phone and bank card were pickpocketed on Día de los Muertos. It was the kindness and generosity of my work colleagues and friends in CDMX that enabled me to bounce back. Most of those relationships I formed in Mexico are still going strong.

When translating ‘Llano’ I was pleased to discover a harmony between Rulfo’s Spanish and my English. His long, multi-clause sentences were preserved wherever possible so that the oral quality of the narration was not lost. I did not perform any significant geographical or cultural adaptations. The names of flora, fauna, characters and places that do not have an easy English analogue are preserved. The narrator’s nom de guerre, for example, goes from “Pichón”, literally meaning pigeon but also connoting inexperience, to “Pidgeon”. The language of the translation therefore becomes recognisably ‘Northern’ but impossible to locate exactly and is rooted in a Jaliscan point of reference. Some of the alienation I felt when reading the original is therefore replicated. I think the impression English readers will get from Pidgeon’s narration is of someone either from some forgotten revolutionary past or an apocalyptic future.

I was lucky enough to have my translation accepted by one of the first publications I sent it to: 91st Meridian. Thanks go to Editor Nataša Ďurovičová for being so amicable and approachable throughout the editing process. Thanks also go to Dr Alana Jackson and Dr Amit Thakkar for introducing me to Rulfo’s writing and the Mexican Revolution. I would finally like to thank Dr Cornelia Gräbner for including the EZLN in the Lent Spanish in Context course.

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