Oedipus Delayed

In order to understand how the publishing industry creates someone like Medina Mora, we must first understand who he was before it got its hands on him. América del Norte is a work of autofiction, and Medina Mora’s fictional double is called Sebastián. They share the same résumé, whose baubles are frequently examined. Both are white Mexicans (“Whitexicans” as they are referred to both in the novel and colloquially) who received elite English-language educations, attended Yale (the preferred Ivy of the Mexican elite), and secured MFAs from the illustrious Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

But there is more. Sebastián and Medina Mora also have the same father. The name of the real-life father is Eduardo Medina Mora, and it is not hyperbole to say he is one of the most disgraced politicians in all of Mexico today.

Medina Mora Sr was one of the key architects of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which accelerated the misery of deindustrialization in the United States and funneled public wealth from Mexico’s poor and indigenous communities into the coffers of international corporations. In 2000, he was appointed by Mexican president Vicente Fox to head CISEN, a since disbanded spy agency with a history of monitoring indigenous movements and political dissidents. After a stint as secretary of public security, he then became the nation’s attorney general, overseeing the height of the Mexican drug war, which has killed over a hundred thousand Mexicans and disappeared tens of thousands more.

From 2012, during the neoliberal presidency of Enrique Peña Nieto, Medina Mora Sr occupied himself as ambassador to the United Kingdom and the United States until his nomination to the Mexican Supreme Court, where he was finally forced to resign in 2019 under accusations of corruption and money laundering. Despite this disgrace, the Medina Mora family today remains one of the central families of the National Action Party (PAN), Mexico’s right-wing party, which represents the interests of its Catholic corporate class.

Initially, all this made me excited to read América del Norte. Medina Mora even heightens the tension with an epigraph by Marxist structuralist Louis Althusser: “It is not enough . . . to look at the exploited classes. You also have to look at the exploiting classes.” Mentions of other radical authors are sprinkled throughout the text, from Karl Marx to Sigmund Freud to Frantz Fanon to Walter Benjamin. Medina Mora is clearly trying to demonstrate, citationally, that he has broken from his father’s ideology. You can’t help but be titillated by the promise of a literary slaying of a despicable father, and by the Marxist-quoting son set to inherit his kingdom, no less.

But just because Medina Mora can quote Marx doesn’t mean he cares to apply him, and many of the seedier details of his father’s past are conveniently omitted. Though his father’s political downfall is a throughline of the novel, any contemplation of Medina Mora Sr’s decades of disastrous policies is carefully couched in intent — his father’s intentions, our protagonist insists, were largely good, even if the results were horrid.

“I sat in my father’s TV room,” he writes, “watching the economist all but tear out fistfuls of his own hair. . . . The problem was his generation of criollos refused to see themselves as colonials. They didn’t realize that their classmates at Harvard and Chicago treated them nicely not because they saw them as equals but because they were light-skinned curiosities in well-cut suits, distinguished guests from a quaint but insignificant country. With Indigenous people and mestizos, it was a different story. The Chicago Boys’ belief in individual freedom didn’t extend to people with dark skin.”

Here Medina Mora admits in passing that, sure, Dad might have been something of a colonial himself (meaning he profited handsomely from the chaos he created, continuously failing upward from economist to UK ambassador to Supreme Court justice). But the real problem was that he was not quite white enough to be respected by the Chicago Boys.

I take no issue with the claim that the Chicago Boys were racist — they were. And the advent of NAFTA certainly entrenched and heightened preexisting xenophobia in the United States through hyper–border militarization. But, as Medina Mora himself makes clear, his father was an architect of those racist policies. He did the racism and made a pretty penny from it. He is not a victim. He is a perpetrator.

Here the key contradiction of the novel arises in full, which our author grapples with continuously, sometimes semiconsciously, sometimes not. Medina Mora’s problem is that everything in his life, everything he has ever been given — all of the privileges and perks that glitter before his eyes — is owed to his family connections in general, and to his powerful father specifically.

The downfall of Medina Mora Sr, then, presents a conundrum for the son. To criticize his father outright would be to lose entrée into his world, but to fully embrace him would be too obvious an alignment with the domination of Mexico. This is the contradiction of América del Norte: Medina Mora must stand by his father, but he must not stand by his father.

His solution, which fails, is — whenever confronted with the abyss of his family’s own violence — to claim he and his father are the victims of racism. Yes, his father made unintentional mistakes, but only because he had been deceived by the real bad guys, those wily and rascally gringos, who will never permit the Medina Mora family full privileges in their club of whiteness.

This is preposterous. First, because, as Medina Mora admits himself, he is white. Second, because many US neoliberals — including those that Medina Mora Sr directly interacted with, including when he was briefly Mexico’s ambassador during Barack Obama’s presidency — are not white. And finally, because, and I cannot overstate this enough, we are talking about some of the most powerful members of Mexico’s ruling class. Medina Mora’s life is more gilded than almost any other person’s on the planet. We are dealing with the Baron Trumps of the world.

If América del Norte had explored the things he’d actually witnessed on the inside growing up, a real come-to-Jesús moment where he rejected or at least reflected soberly upon the stolen wealth that made his elite formation possible — that is, if he’d been brave enough to write nonfiction instead — we’d be talking about one of the most interesting books of the year.

But Medina Mora does not go down this route, which would subject him — and, importantly, his father and his family wealth — to third-party fact-checking. So he escapes into autofiction instead and its unaccountability.

Reveal, Conceal

Before proceeding, a clarification: this is not another rant about autofiction, at least autofiction in its entirety. I believe the subgenre, when executed with an ethical framework in mind, has its merits, especially when employed to undo a notion of the self, to lay bare its borders and then transgress them.

There was even a moment in América del Norte that seemed to promise something of similar effect. Early in the novel, our protagonist is sent on a reporting assignment to South Carolina to cover a mass shooting at a historically black church. The church is presumably Mother Emanuel, where the white supremacist Dylann Roof murdered nine black congregants in 2015. In a strange twist of fate, Sebastián encounters a man who is potentially Roof’s father on a country backroad. Then the man pulls a shotgun on him.

For a moment, I was struck by the idea that if Medina Mora had ended it all here — if he had allowed Sebastián to have his autofictional head autofictionally blown off — he could have created something remarkable. A small hybrid of Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther, where the young bourgeois slowly realizes the only decent thing to do is kill himself, with something reminiscent of a Flannery O’Connor short story, where a bigoted and insolent redneck, at the height of his bigotry and insolence, ironically because of his bigotry and insolence, accidently becomes a comrade of the Mexican working class, the tick of his finger unknowingly sweeping away the progeny of one of Mexico’s most vicious men.

Of course, I knew this move was improbable, but I was still excited by the prospect that Medina Mora might be willing to explore that kind of strange and much more personal violence, a sincere recognition that atrocities against US and Mexican working classes are not distinct but have worked together, sometimes in tandem, sometimes through disavowal, for centuries. But Medina Mora does something much less interesting: he allows his fictional self to keep living — and talking — for 405 more pages.

Slogging through those pages, it became clear I was not reading a novel so much as one of the world’s longest résumés. Here Medina Mora is in good company. Much of what is mass marketed to us as autofiction today is actually an extended personal ad for a boring bourgeois child. The cliché is that some truths can only be told through fiction, but today it’s just as likely — especially in the case of Medina Mora — that the writer flees into autofiction in order to escape them.

Autofiction allows Medina Mora to scrap biographical details that an editor of nonfiction would likely feel are essential. For instance, that his father was the mentor and close confidant of Genaro García Luna, his direct successor as the secretary of public security, who was convicted of aiding El Chapo’s Sinaloa Cartel in large-scale drug trafficking operations. Or that his uncle, Manuel Medina Mora, as the copresident of Citigroup and the president of Citibanamex, directed the dreadful privatization of the Mexican banking system (like his brother, he was also reportedly forced to resign over connection to financial crimes, specifically his bank’s massive defrauding of the state oil company, Pemex, for nearly half a billion dollars). Or that his other uncle, José Medina Mora, headed the country’s leading business group, Coparmex, one of several organizations that pushes the interests of a coterie of right-wing Mexican billionaires. Medina Mora explores none of these relations, though he does, with calculated brevity, mention that his father and García Luna “differed” on the violence of the drug war (even though the attorney general worked closely with the to-be convicted felon, now serving a thirty-eight-year sentence in US federal prison, for years).

Here we return to the novel’s central but unspoken contradiction — Medina Mora’s professional need to both stand by and not stand by his father. It’s a fascinating predicament to be in, if only he could explore it honestly. But the curtain is never peeled back. Instead, in order to repress the real contradiction, he presents us with a false one: that he feels white and not white at the same time.

This is, supposedly, our protagonist’s constant struggle. In the United States, Sebastián is subjected to a litany of ignorant gringos who equate Mexicanness with brownness; these decidedly uncosmopolitan liberals cannot imagine a racial schema distinct from the one in their country. Medina Mora initially had my sympathies in this respect. Who hasn’t, in the past few years, grown tired of the myopia and rigidity of normative US notions of race?

But instead of rejecting this myopia, Sebastián begins to ask himself if, actually, the gringos aren’t right after all. Maybe he isn’t quite white. This move is useful to him on several fronts. At an unconscious level, it assuages his guilt. Medina Mora’s constant neuroticism about being “not quite white” becomes a symptom that effectively distracts him (and the reader) from his unresolved ambivalences regarding his relation to his father (whiteness is inherited, after all) and what he himself will eventually claim as his birthright.

At a more deliberate level, however, the question of whiteness allows Medina Mora to speak the language of the liberal publishing industry. Bourgeois children are taught to play the cards they are dealt, and, in the United States, Medina Mora is given an extra card. The hyperfixation on his physical features becomes a means of not seeing all the other things that attach themselves to his body — huge family inheritances, elite credentials, teams of (poorer, browner) armed bodyguards, and even, presumably, diplomatic immunity while abroad with his ambassador father. All these things are much more important than the shade of Medina Mora’s skin, which is precisely why they are glossed over in his text. But the publishing industry’s shallow version of identity politics has little means of comprehending, let alone pushing back against, this rhetorical trick.

A second clarification: this is also not another rant against identity politics. It is a criticism of how the publishing industry embraces identity politics only and up to the point that certain identities can be commodified. As even Judith Butler recently stated, “Identity is, for me, a point of departure for alliances. . . . But you can’t have a politics of identity that is only about identity. If you do that, you draw sectarian lines, and you abandoned our interdependent ties.”

Put another way, América del Norte is a perfect example of what Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò calls “elite capture,” in which powerful people like Medina Mora co-opt identity politics and repurpose it for their own ends. The publishing industry permits elite capture for several reasons. First, it makes money, packaging identity into something salable. Second, it’s easy. As publishing houses continue to consolidate or fold, and as news outlets increasingly shutter foreign bureaus, international perspectives are largely reduced to those who already have the finances and professional connections to promote themselves. Editors don’t have to go out looking for actual “marginalized voices” — which are difficult to find and harder to edit — when they already have a line of properly credentialed bourgeois children who know how to play the part.

This kind of elite capture aligns neatly with the liberal fetish of expertise, and together they produce in the publishing industry what I call the Great Knower Complex. The Great Knowers are those writers who, supposedly, uniquely comprehend the essence of an identity. Actually, this doesn’t go far enough. They are born as the identity, so they are the essence. Crucially, each identity is always described as inherently different from anything else. Which is really to say, “No one is allowed to commodify this identity but me.”

This is where deciding he is not quite white really pays dividends for Medina Mora, literally. It also means that as the Great Mexico Knower, his essence is wholly distinct from anyone else he encounters in the United States. This is most clearly on display when, during his time at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Donald Trump is elected, an event that rattles our protagonist. He begins carrying his passport everywhere, perhaps because (the logic is never quite clear) he is worried about being misidentified as an undocumented migrant. What Medina Mora previously criticized uninformed gringos for — collapsing the category of “Mexican” into brownness, precarity, and undocumented status — is the very thing he turns toward to portray himself as a victim.

It is important to emphasize that at no point does Trump actually have any concrete impact on Sebastián’s life. His election is framed as a wildly distinct threat, an unprecedented break from “sensible” politics, but, in fact, for someone as powerful as Medina Mora, all of this is basically melodrama. The reality is that Trump is a salient continuation of an economic system that Medina Mora’s right-wing father has long had a hand in, and from which his son has benefited his entire life.

But Medina Mora refuses to see this. Not long after the election, Sebastián passes a University of Iowa frat bro near campus, and he considers “interrogat[ing] him about his brothers’ support for a candidate so clownishly unfit for the presidency — but the young man snorted and spit a glob of saliva the color of chewing tobacco in my general direction.”

This interaction is one of several that Medina Mora uses to portray the locals as mostly red-blooded knuckle-draggers. And, sure, the United States definitely has its fair share. But for all his hemming and hawing about the ignoramuses of Iowa (who do not enter his prose as actual characters, remaining in Medina Mora’s aristocratic view a more or less faceless mass), he never considers that his father played a direct role in creating this dumbass deindustrialized palace of corn in the first place. Under NAFTA, the hicks feed upon the same corn that’s shipped down to Mexico for tortillas.

The people Medina Mora finds so repugnant are more like his mutant brethren than his enemies, perverse siblings spawned from the neoliberalism his father so fervently sowed. He is the crown prince promised the stolen riches of his father’s ugly capitalist kingdom. The frat bro is but a bastard son doomed to occupy the monocropping shadowlands. Seen in this light, that young man had every right to spit in Medina Mora’s direction, even if he did it for the wrong reasons.

Here is a real opportunity to take identity, and the politics it entails, seriously. But our protagonist is not interested in using his identity as a “point of departure for alliances,” as Butler says. The Great Mexico Knower disavows this fundamental relation.

Rabble at the Gates

Besides his father, the only family member Medina Mora turns his attention to is his mother, who is dying of cancer. Reflecting upon the arc of her life, Medina Mora provides a fairly cutting critique, much more cutting than anything he writes about his father, which largely has to do with his mother giving up her life as a structural anthropologist with indigenous communities in order to earn more money.

“My mother’s radicalism shriveled,” he writes. “She traded her huipiles for pretty dresses and high heels and parleyed her expertise in statistics into jobs at a political consulting firm and later at a bank.” His mother was naive, he continues, and though she playacted for a while at helping indigenous women, in the end her class interests won out, and she returned to the life of an elite bourgeois woman.

But if this is true, Medina Mora’s mother’s shortcoming is every bit his own. If she failed to be meaningfully changed by her experiences in the field, to be moved by the people around her, her son fails doubly so. Perhaps this is why he distances himself from her so readily. She at least ventured out to live among the poor, to sleep on dirt floors, to go hungry, to watch children die of curable diseases. Medina Mora, in his infinite and readymade wisdom, critiques his mother post-factum without submitting himself to discomfort, suffering, or connection with those unlike him. He already Knows everything, and so he doesn’t have to do anything.

This leads to the climax and most troubling aspect of América del Norte, which is Medina Mora’s return to his homeland. Framed as a flight from Trumpian persecution (which, again, does not exist in any meaningful way in the text), Medina Mora — not even a prodigal son really, just a son on an extended study abroad — returns home to assume his rightful place among the Mexican elite. That’s it. That’s the conclusion of the book. There’s not much more to it than that.

But that doesn’t stop him from throwing more melodrama into the mix. Not long after his return, a small group of protesters gathers outside his father’s mansion while he’s throwing a party. Medina Mora frames the event as a terrifying attack on his family’s privacy, even grabbing a meat cleaver in case the poors break down the door. Medina Mora seems unaware of this, but the scene is almost an exact mirror of one in the 2020 reactionary film Nuevo Orden, in which a garden party thrown by Whitexicans is overrun by the rabble of Mexico City, who quickly beat and rape the partygoers. Except the protest in the book is ultimately a peaceful affair. Nothing happens, but it’s another opportunity for Medina Mora to call himself a victim.

Medina Mora’s return to his home country also coincides with the rise of Mexico’s new political party Morena, which ousts his father and many of his right-wing colleagues from power. (Nuevo Orden, in fact, reflects elite Mexicans’ anxieties and resentments over these very events, where the “new order” is a reference to Morena’s reshuffling of the political order.) As with the Iowans, Medina Mora is wholly dismissive of the Mexican masses’ support for the new populist president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO), who he sees as obviously beneath the sophistication of the previous ruling class, including his father.

It is never mentioned that the masses might be embracing AMLO with such fervor because, during his presidency, his party reversed a number of policies Medina Mora Sr’s family was responsible for, lifting at least five million Mexicans out of poverty in the process. Medina Mora spent years trying to figure out how to stand and not stand beside his father, but in the end his father was deposed by the very people he spent his career exploiting.

But Medina Mora is still making out alright. América del Norte has received fairly widespread coverage for a debut novel, including a positive review in the New York Times. US-based publications that defer to him as a Great Knower consistently fail to identify his father as a direct antagonist of AMLO. Nearly two decades ago, while AMLO was the mayor of Mexico City, he publicly identified Medina Mora Sr as an architect of a lawfare campaign against him known as the “desafuero,” the impeachment. Much of the population saw this as an attack by the Mexican ruling class — and the Medina Mora clan specifically — to kneecap AMLO’s eventual bid for the presidency.

Framing Medina Mora as an expert in all things Mexico while overtly ignoring this deep conflict of interest is industry malfeasance, plain and simple, and it creates conditions hostile to those less powerful than him. The first person Jacobin asked to review América del Norte — a white Latinx writer themselves — ended up declining for fear of retaliation by him.

Medina Mora holds even greater power in the Latin American literary world. Since his return to Mexico, he has become the senior editor of Nexos, a national magazine that — much like a certain work of autofiction — cloaks itself in vaguely left rhetoric in order to push reactionary politics and criticize those enemies who do not Know Mexico the way he does.

But just as Marx says the capitalist does not understand capital, and Freud says the patient does not perceive their symptom, the structural anthropologist says even the chieftain misses something crucial about their tribe. We all have blind spots. Which is why, in the United States, we need Mexican voices, voices from the outside, to tell us who we really are. But that is just as true of Mexico as it is of the United States. In his attempt to be the Great Mexico Knower, Medina Mora sets himself up for failure. There are things about Mexico that only the stranger can see. We’re not getting the “real” Mexico from Medina Mora; we’re just getting a particular haute bourgeois depiction of it.

I conclude with a final passage of América del Norte that so beautifully illustrates this. Medina Mora is in one of his favorite cantinas when a man enters to sing for money, a troubadour. As the troubadour locks eyes with our protagonist, the Great Mexico Knower frames the moment as “a sudden intimacy more reminiscent of a confessional or a brothel than a concert.”

But confession and sex work are two social configurations in which people, quite famously, do not look each other in the eye. Despite my better judgement, this was one of the few moments I felt a slight tenderness for Medina Mora, specifically because he had let slip something he had not meant to. I could suddenly see in him a lonely bourgeois child, now grown into a lonely bourgeois man, who hopes that because he’s paid a stranger for a song, he can access a genuine moment of human intimacy. But the troubadour does not sing for intimacy. He sings for money. Here, in an interaction that Medina Mora presents as authentically Mexican, he doesn’t understand what’s actually happening. It’s an ever-so-brief glimpse into his insecurities, an accidental vulnerability, a not-knowing.

This not-knowing happens to all of us, even and especially in our families and homelands. None of us can access some essence of our own society, because it is not real, and it is not our own. This is why I felt that momentary affection for Medina Mora — his mistake is one each of us makes in our own way. But by continuously obsessing over solidifying himself as some cultural arbiter of what Mexico actually is — some identity politics interpreter for the gringos who couldn’t possibly comprehend the rich cultural complexities that are his alone — he reveals just how little he understands about Mexico himself.

Which, by his own measure, is very gringo. Welcome to the club, Nicolás.