Foreign Correspondence I

On Karla Cornejo Villavicencio

Hello and welcome!

This newsletter has been dormant for years—to the point that, the last time I sent a note, Foreign Correspondence was still hosted on TinyLetter. I’ve decided to revive it because I’m taking an indefinite break from Twitter, and Substack strikes me as a good way to share my work without returning to that place of doom. I might start writing here with some regularity, but for now I’ll limit myself to sending an occasional note whenever I publish a new piece.

This time around I’m writing to share my review of Karla Cornejo Villavicencio’s first novel, Catalina, which came out in The Atlantic this morning. The book has moments of brilliance, but it’s also a bit unsatisfying. Here’s the “thesis statement” of the piece:

Then again, it could be that Catalina’s reliance on stereotypes is a symptom of her struggle with a world that lets those reductive perceptions, rather than people’s actual qualities, determine who they can be. Early on, Catalina says that she and Delphine “looked like two characters from the same cartoon animator.” Perhaps Cornejo Villavicencio is more astute than her protagonist. Perhaps this is a novel about a young woman so overwhelmed by American racism that she can’t help describing herself and her Latina friend as identical caricatures. Such is the paradox of identity in the contemporary United States: If marginalized people want to be seen—which is to say, recognized—they have to become stereotypical.ç

In other news, I’m afraid I have become one of those horrible creatures: the podcast bro. My good friend Ricardo López Cordero and I have been recording our conversations—in Spanish—about Mexican intellectual history and publishing them as Archivo General. The first four episodes—on Bartolomé de las Casas and 16th debates on the morality of colonialism, Enrique Krauze and the intellectual poverty of the Democratic Transition, Rosario Castellanos and the “baroque fold,” and José Emilio Pacheco and the birth of the “classical PRI”—are now available wherever you listen to podcasts.

I think that’s all for now? Thank you very much for reading!

Yours,

NMMP