Rewriting Mexican Masculinity: Stereotyping/ Countertyping Men: In Cristina Rivera Garza's Nadie Me Vera Llorar (Ensayo Critico)

For a stereotype to come into existence, George Mosse argues that an efficient system and hierarchy of countertypes must first be constructed. He notes that the masculine stereotype was to be strengthened by "the existence of a negative stereotype of men who not only failed to measure up to the ideal but who in body and soul were its foil, projecting the exact opposite of true masculinity" (6). The Mexican macho of the 20th century, as chronicled by Hector Dominguez Ruvalcaba and Robert McKee Irwin embodies such a stereotype. His behavior is virile and active. He is a patriarch, he is a breadwinner, and he is the aggressor in sexual relations. The stereotype of the Mexican man has been played with and demystified effectively from a novelistic scope. Writers from a diverse sampling such as Luis Zapata (La hermana secreta de Angelica Maria 1989), Mario Bellatin (Salon de belleza 1994), and Ana Clavel (Cuerpo naufrago 2005) have examined what it means to be a man in Mexico and have by means of devices such as parody, physiological transformation and the queering of the male voice and space, put under a microscope the symbol of man. In a similar vein, Cristina Rivera Garza in La cresta de Ilion (2002) deconstructs man through the identity crisis experienced by the unnamed protagonist, who is told by a mysterious metaliterary Amparo Davila that she knows that he is a woman. Similarly, in Ningun reloj cuenta esto, Rivera Garza examines in a selection of short stories the role of men, and women, in gender politics. Such a palpable male stereotype is evidently a locus of reflection for these authors who are not only bent on the action of transgression, but who also imbue gender as a central force within identity politics in their texts. Mosse, however, argues that the stereotype is a historical process and that its contemporary manifestations are a careful product and evolution of fin du siecle and early 20th-century representations of men. Rivera Garza's earlier novel, Nadie me vera llorar (1999), narrates the dispersed history of Matilda Burgos, a woman incarcerated in a psychiatric institution, who by means of a dialectic twist of language, shape, and othering, is presented as an enigma. Though temporally situated in the years of the Porfiriato and the Mexican Revolution, the novel is largely ahistoric. In an interview, Rivera Garza admits that the novel is historical, but that her primary focus in the text is an examination of language and not necessarily reality (Hind "Entrevista" 193). Critics however have articulated the importance of gender in the work (Castro Ricalde, Roberts-Camps, Hind, Bautista Botello, Estrada), which cannot be divorced from the historiographic strategies of the text. Furthermore, Roberts-Camps, citing Debra Castillo, has also argued that Rivera Garza creates a counternarrative to the story of the whore (64). Therefore, while the novel does not explicate historical processes or events as typified by the new historical novel (Menton, Ainsa), it does provide a temporal paradigm in which the role of men and women can be identified in early 20th century Mexico. The critical work to date focused on the theme of transgression within gender has largely paid attention to the figure of Matilda Burgos, denying the importance of the various male characters in the author's examination of gender. As a counterpoint, this study demonstrates how Rivera Garza, in examining gender, and by means of the multiplicity of men in the novel, explores and evaluates the notion of countertype in the construct of masculinity in Mexico.