A Writing Life in Mexico City

Novelist, poet, and essayist Daniel Saldaña París writes about the poets, the grants, the ageism, and the planes over Mexico City for Electric Lit's series, The Writing Life Around the World. An excerpt:

...Nobody writes for a living in Mexico. Or rather some people do, but those are people I don’t know and ultimately have no interest at all in knowing. To live comfortably as a writer in Mexico, you need to have a lot of opinions about soccer and politics — in a very shallow sense of the word politics, you can be sure. The rest of us Mexican writers spend our time sending pitiful e-mails soliciting work or applying for grants, when we’re not laboring obscene hours at jobs somehow related to writing.

I didn’t know any of this when I came to live in the city exactly ten years ago, eager to express in innocent verses my squalid vision of the world while listening to the music of the synagogue and the piano tuner. Back then I believed, with ridiculous fervor, that I would be the glorious exception to the norm. I’d devote myself to writing, and from my roofless hallway in Colonia Roma, I’d gradually conquer the world. Instead I ended up working ten- and eleven-hour days for a magazine, a publishing house, a festival, an independent movie.

Writing in Mexico City is like holding a conversation when you’re under the takeoff and landing path of the city’s airplanes: you have to shut up sometimes, to let the noise take over everything, to let the sky split in two before picking up where you left off. From 2006 to 2015 I tried to be a writer in Mexico City. The sky split in two many, many times during those years.

At first I survived on grants. Now, in Mexico there are grants for young writers which require them to attend workshops led by their senior colleagues. These older writers are, barring some exceptions, people whose only merit is having gotten old. Literature in Mexico is a gerontocracy. The old are praised for surviving to another birthday; the young are regarded with suspicion and treated with contempt. And the workshops, in general, are places where all the edges are filed off a piece of writing, where a text is homogenized until it loses all capacity to wound or bewilder. For three years I lived off grants of this kind, confronting the workshop system with hyperbolic obstinacy.

Read on at Electric Lit.