Tonatiuh's People:
A Novel of the Mexican Cataclysm
John Ross

In the middle of this compelling new novel by John Ross, the narrator, a grizzled American journalist living in Mexico, describes how it feels to cover a populist insurgency in the countryside. "Do you know how history smells? How it tastes? Well, you can smell it and taste it out there . . . It makes you take sides."

The author—an old Mexico hand himself—has always taken sides. Most of the foreign correspondents in Mexico City pride themselves on their detachment and "objectivity," dutifully filling their dispatches with quotes from bankers, diplomats and power brokers. But Ross's reportage, which appears in alternative publications like the L.A. Weekly, the San Francisco Bay Guardian and the Texas Observer, as well as papers in England, Peru and Mexico, transmits the perspective of a different group of Mexicans: the tens of millions condemned to live and die in hellish urban shantytowns and impoverished rural hamlets. Ross's identification with the poor and the marginalized is emphatically not a recipe for career advancement, but it's a choice that would have made his hero, John Reed—the author of Insurgent Mexico and Ten Days That Shook The World, and the subject of the movie Reds—proud.

Tonatiuh's People mostly takes place in the year 2000, in a Mexico that is both exaggerated and oddly familiar: a place where 150,000 newborns die every year from the vile smog; where Disney has purchased vast stretches of coastline; and where the border has been sealed with a giant electrified fence. The central character, Tonatiuh, is a charismatic doctor who spearheads a mass movement against Mexico's sclerotic ruling party, the PRI, which has clung to power since the late 1920s.

Tonatiuh is evidently modeled after Cuáhtemoc Cárdenas, the current mayor of Mexico City—and the first freely elected mayor in the city's history. Many of the book's scenes seem directly based on Cárdenas's recent political history, especially his unsuccessful presidential campaigns in 1988 and 1994, which Ross covered as a reporter. Cárdenas is perhaps the central figure in Mexico's political transition: the son of Lázaro Cárdenas, the revered president of the 1930s, Cuáhtemoc won the 1988 presidential election, but had it stolen from him by the PRI, which blatantly and criminally manipulated the computerized tally.

Much of the action takes place in the Mexican countryside, where Tonatiuh (like Cárdenas) has many supporters, and where centuries of peasant resistance have coalesced into a loud call for social justice. But Tonatiuh's People also gives readers a far-reaching portrait of many different levels of today's Mexico: with a comic touch, Ross shows us the fratricidal combat raging within the upper echelons of the PRI; the debates among the byzantine factions of the Mexican Left; the cynicism and arrogance of the foreign press corps; and the activists, of diverse backgrounds, who, at great personal risk, are agitating for democratic change.

By and large, Ross's book-length reportage—especially his indispensable Rebellion From The Roots: Indian Uprising in Chiapas (1995)—is superior to his fiction. As a novel, Tonatiuh's People is somewhat loose and disjointed; his editor should have pruned fifty pages from the middle of the book. But it lives up to its subtitle—"a novel of the Mexican cataclysm"—by providing a chilling and accurate portrait of Mexico on the eve of the millennium, a portrait one is unlikely to find in mainstream newspapers or on CNN broadcasts.

But a deadly serious message lurks beneath the novel's comic surface. Today, the Mexican Left is split between those who see elections as a viable strategy for political change, and those who argue that grassroots action, rather than balloting, is the best hope for the future. The tragic fate that befalls Tonatiuh is an indication that Ross stands with the pessimists, and that, in his view, the PRI will never yield the presidential chair in the year 2000—which Cárdenas, in all likelihood, will seek for a third time.

Such pessimism is debatable, but it has a factual basis: the PRI is one of the planet's most tenacious political dynasties, one that, time and again, has demonstrated its willingness to resort to any form of chicanery or deception. One of the men who founded the PRI system, and served it with complete loyalty for half a century, was veteran union leader Fidel Velásquez, who, before his death in 1997, was the second most powerful man in Mexico after the president. In a phrase that has since entered the country's lexicon, Velásquez warned that the PRI is here to stay: "Bullets brought us to power," he once quipped, "and only bullets will drive us from power." The old labor boss has passed from the scene, but his political descendents remain, and his words hang in the air like one of those dark, filthy clouds suspended over Mexico City.

Reviewed by Scott Sherman
01.25.99