Overview

Based on a trip to the now abandoned Mexican mercury mining town of San Felipe Nuevo Mercurio, The Company explores the development of mercury mining as a technology and its present environmental consequences, both predictable and unforeseen, in what Cristina Rivera Garza terms “an exemplary disappropriative work.” In a book that subverts both textual and graphic expectations, part a involves a rewriting of Amparo Dávila’s “The Houseguest,” changing specific aspects of the text: verb tenses are transposed to the future; the houseguest becomes the menacing presence of The Company; and the domestic helper who suffers the intimidation of The Company along with her unnamed female employer is the machine. In part b, scientific reports dating from the 1950s to the present day, conversations with experts and miners, and excerpts from the story of “Long, Tall José” construct a history of mercury mining in the area and the subsequent environmental contamination. In both sections, text is accompanied by images that range from Gerber Bicecci’s intervened photographs of the ghost town and the surrounding area to technical diagrams and reinterpreted maps, plus pictograms from Manuel Felguérez’s La máquina estética (1975). As Rivera Garza says in her epilogue, “Gerber Bicecci moves us toward the past and the future, without for an instant forgetting the present we share . . . Nothing is at peace here, everything is at stake.”

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A timely, urgent contribution aimed at helping us, its readers, picture the causes and the extent of the environmental devastation that will condition the future. This is a visual-literary project that has captured the attention and imagination of its public and critics, and it is not an exaggeration to say that it is one of the most successful Latin American cultural products in recent memory. -- Marcela Romero Rivera * Comparative Literature and Culture *

Author Information

Verónica Gerber Bicecci is a visual artist who writes. Her works include the series of drawings Diagrams of Silence, an exercise in visual exhumation based on the punctuation of various poems, and Mudanza (2010), a collection of essays about writers who deserted conventional literature to become visual artists. She currently coordinates, with Guillermo Espinosa Estrada, the Permanent Diagonal Writing Workshop in Mexico City. Christina MacSweeney is the translator of Valeria Luiselli’s The Story of My Teeth, which received the 2016 Valle Inclán Translation Prize and was also shortlisted for the Dublin Literary Award. Her translations include collaborations with Daniel Saldaña París, Elvira Navarro, Julián Herbert, Jazmina Barrera, and Karla Suárez. Cristina Rivera Garza is the acclaimed author of The Iliac Crest, The Taiga Syndrome, Liliana's Invincible Summer, and Ningún reloj cuenta esto, among other books. Rivera Garza is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, the Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Prize, and the Anna Seghers Prize.

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