VOICES OF SEA AND DESERT: THE NOVEL OF GUILLERMO MUNRO
SYLVIA AGUILAR SELENY AND RITA PLANCARTE MARTINEZ
The novel of Guillermo Munro is dominated by an obstinate and obsessive will to narrate; to tell the ups and down
of the life histories of those men and women that who have survived and generated their own cultural values,
immersed in a hostile and beloved environment, the sea and the desert.
The first characteristic mark of the work of Munro is the location of his stories in the environment of sea and
desert, border areas in many ways. The sea as the beginning of the alien world that, even when it resists the
domination by men, offers him its fruits lavishly; the desert as the limit of the “civilized” and as an experience that
carries man to his physical limit, and both desert and sea in a geographic location neighboring another country,
with other laws and other ways of understanding reality. Desert and sea are here a border zone, a species of
no man’s land that give place to experiences of life marked by the cultural values resulting from the constant
struggle of man against the adversity of hostile elements. Because nature, scarcely generous in these latitudes,
has obligated a daily struggle for survival that, upon becoming habit, ends up generating an identity between the
elements and the human beings that suffer from them, identity which becomes a loving and understanding attitude
between these and their habitat.
In his novels Munro successfully creates an image of that world and of the conditions and work of the beings that
occupy it. Living and surviving in that world give the author his anecdotal material. This material is filled with life
experiences, of thirsts, all over which are constructed the images of men of coastal Sonora. These are images
that forge an identity that, while with its particular characteristics, communes easily with the common concerns of
humans.
Reconstructing the presence and relation of man with that environment, Munro has offered us novels that rise to
a narrative tradition whose goal is to represent sectors of reality that had remained outside the literary word. We
consider that his work continues the tradition represented by The Stories of the Desert (1959) by Emma
Dolujanoff, The Mountains and the Wind (1975) by Gerardo Cornejo, The Waxing (Increasing) (1975) by Armida de
la Vara and Well of Crisanto (1977) by Leo Sandoval, among other texts that recover and represent the conflictive
relationship of man with his space/time, and further reconstruct a particular way of understanding and living it,
both from the perspective of the narrators and through the voice of the persons.
The obstinate and obsessive need to narrate is the second distinctive mark of Munro’s novels. It is this
eagerness, one of the most valid and alive of literary work, that generates and gives life to this rich world of
representations, that is, the urgency to give textual life to that sector of reality in which the identity of the author
sinks roots and that later he seeks to share with the reader.
Therefore we cannot trace his motives and his references in a specific dialogue with the general context of the
canonic literature; we do not seek formal complexity in his novels because even when they possess it to some
degree, it is difficult for us to relate it with any particular established literary form. His individual formulation urges
thinking of the oral as his obligatory reference. Within the three works of this author we encounter as a common
denominator the echo of a genuine oral tradition. Some passages are nearly faithful transcriptions of dialogues.
In fact, if an observation be made of his texts, it is precisely that such dialogues, on occasion, try to be made
literature – perhaps at the hand of some editor – and the voices in dialogue lose the freshness of the proper turns
within their particular enunciation. The oral tradition, manifested in the aforementioned dialogues, and in the use of
the represented community’s own vocabulary, is the privileged form from which can be reconstructed the
conflicts and experiences of a community whose own history is born out of the same oral tradition, as such,
given its characteristics, lives at the margin of literary life. At the same time this privileged form is the vehicle for
the same novelistic expression. From here, for example, from the oral interview is generated the recovery of the
memory in The Voices Come from the Sea.
We can say the oral tradition is evidenced in the form in which the themes of the oral tradition are picked up and
elaborated. In the three novels, anecdotal passages are encountered proceeding from this form of expression,
as such we discover within the novelistic world the resonance of the popular voice that narrates the history of
appearances, tragic journeys, ghosts and other similar themes that always have shaped part of the non-written
literary form and pertain to the natural and ancestral manner of any community. The novels of Munro succeed in
recovering and making prevalent that popular voice whose ultimate goal is to maintain memory of the facts and
configure a community identity. From here such oral forms can be detected on the stylistic as well as the
compositional levels.
The events narrated in the novels take shape within explicit historic frameworks: the Revolution, the Cristero War,
the anti-Chinese campaign, the hounding of the yaquis, and others set the scene in which the persons act in
these novels. Here the author reinserts the people into the historic action, setting out their experiences and giving
a human vision to history, modifying the perception of historic facts so the reader can distinguish a personal
perspective of the subjects who have been objects of the historical events. Munro thus recovers a history
different from the official one and provides us with testimonial viewpoints, which enrich our perception of the
relevant facts about Mexican history.
Therefore, these novels approach more nearly the form of testimonials that has characterized the literature in
Mexico and in Latin America, and in recovering the voice of the reporter seeks to recover those values and facts
that form the base of the regional identity. To be and belong to a particular space implies identification with the
same space and with the formation of a social group, in this case the desert and the sea are geographic
dimensions from where a mode of life is learned, and with it the relationships and conflicts within which lay
passions and common concerns.
In this manner, in The Voices Come from the Sea, Munro travels the shores of distinct histories in distinct ports of
Sonora. We are witnesses to a long list of events that trace the lives of various fishermen and their families. On
the one hand we have those that have defined our country: the Revolution, religious persecution, the oppression
of the indigenous, foreign influences; on the other there are those events adhering to the interior of every person,
personal and common struggles to survive in a determined time and space, two aspects of the medium before
which the persons in this novel are confronted.
In this novel, one of the heirs of a fishermen’s saga initiates the search for a memory lost in the sea and in the
past, to clarify the mysterious death of fisherman Alejandro Palacio. He is taken to listen – and share with the
reader – the testimony of those who participate in the fishing enterprise on the coast of the state of Sonora,
during the first forty years of this century. In ports such as Guaymas, Puerto Peñasco, Puerto Lobos, Puerto
Libertad and Kino Bay; they weigh anchor to begin a journey to those anecdotes that together form a book – a
monument that the narrator prepares in honor of the fishermen “who traveled the coasts when there was nobody
there”, so that “they will not pass through this life unnoticed” (p. 179). In this way, we hear their responses to
the questions that can clarify a death and strengthen the membership in a family.
Inserted into these testimonies – compiled between 1984 and 1989 – is another journey, that initiated October 4,
1911, by the family of Melquíades Palacio and that will unite other families that live and work in Sonoran ports,
who ended up being founders of new settlements – Puerto Peñasco and Kino Bay. We are not presented with
brief fragments of these people but with following a long phase of their lives. The same history is presented to us
in two forms: the interview and the fictional recreation of the facts. Through the interviews carried out recently
the past is reconstructed in a scattered and in some ways incomplete form, but we also listen to the development
of those actions at the moment they were occurring, stories constructed from the past into the present and
culminating with the death of Alejandro Palacio. The protagonists of these two roads are the same but in different
epochs offering again two perspectives before the same fact. Precisely in this composition of history lies the
great virtue of the novel. Already reaffirmed is the introduction of the common reader to a world that can be
alien. Witnesses to the dialogue of and among persons include the reader and the author. Further, the multiple
journeys to the interior and exterior of the people are also voyages to the interior and the exterior of a time and
space determinative for the people of the social and geographic environment of the north. The border and the
desert are also traversed, elements that as the sea offer a challenge within the lives of the characters, adding an
epic character to the stories.
In a similar way, in The Sufferings of Puerto Esperanza, different stories interweave to show the daily life of a
fictitious town anchored in a specific historic time, the epoch of the Second World War.
From the perspective of Miguel, a young man who lives in the passage from childhood to youth, experiences of
life of the many people of a fishing community near the border are reconstructed. The events relevant to the
social life of a town on the coast, the fiestas of carnival, the power relationships, the initiation into sexuality, the
experiences that signify passing into adulthood, the family relationships and the conduct of prototypal persons
such as the rich, the strange or the rogue are the themes that interest the young narrator in determining who
murdered Marcos García Sangabriel, and why. The search for the truth is converted into a decisive factor in his
transformation into an adult. None of the evident tracks lead to anything. Therefore, when he discovers the truth
and succeeds in sorting out the complexity of human relationships, he leaves behind an ingenuous vision of life
and enters the world of adults.
The Devil’s Highway, offers the reader the chronicle of a journey through a most inhospitable landscape, the road
between Sonoyta and San Luis Río Colorado. The arid and unmerciful land puts to the test the capacity of man to
dominate it. Thirst is the enemy to conquer, but so also are the passions: ambition, intolerance and lust.
The novel is set out in two basic dimensions, one corresponds to the personal stories of the people in the days
before the journey, from which are derived the reasons that move them to travel toward California, and the other
relates the details of the journey. The world narrated presents unbelievable violence, from the tension that the
hostile environment provokes to the execrable nature of some of the people unable to show any solidarity, which
renders them incapable of doing any group work with the ultimate goal of crossing the desert successfully.
These persons are contrasted with those that are positively transformed through this experience, as they learn
solidarity and to be responsible, leading them to reconciliation within their own selves.
The travelers drag their personal stories out of one another and the journey converts into a form of expiation of
guilt and reconsidering of their conduct. The negation of personal identity, the racial intolerance – appearing as
the shameful Anti China campaign that flourished in Sonora in the late 1920’s and the early 1930’s -, the perverse
ambition of the ex-revolutionary bandits, the disdain of the gringos toward the Mexicans appear as themes
through the voices and actions of the different and abundant personalities. Thus appears an extremely
interesting and well-placed character, the Indian Hemeterio, of O’odham ancestry, who is in charge of guiding the
expedition even though he is running from life. This person is constructed from his personal cosmovision, his
personal doubts and the fractures in his personal identity; this serves to reshape him apart from the work he
undertakes, that is to say, guiding the expedition leads him to guide himself towards his own self-recovery.
It is thus that the voluntary narrative of Guillermo Munro traps and transports the reader through the oral history,
subjecting one to interpenetration with a reality that, although alien, is converted into one’s own through the
esthetic experience of reading.
SYLVIA AGUILAR SELENY AND RITA PLANCARTE MARTINEZ
The novel of Guillermo Munro is dominated by an obstinate and obsessive will to narrate; to tell the ups and down
of the life histories of those men and women that who have survived and generated their own cultural values,
immersed in a hostile and beloved environment, the sea and the desert.
The first characteristic mark of the work of Munro is the location of his stories in the environment of sea and
desert, border areas in many ways. The sea as the beginning of the alien world that, even when it resists the
domination by men, offers him its fruits lavishly; the desert as the limit of the “civilized” and as an experience that
carries man to his physical limit, and both desert and sea in a geographic location neighboring another country,
with other laws and other ways of understanding reality. Desert and sea are here a border zone, a species of
no man’s land that give place to experiences of life marked by the cultural values resulting from the constant
struggle of man against the adversity of hostile elements. Because nature, scarcely generous in these latitudes,
has obligated a daily struggle for survival that, upon becoming habit, ends up generating an identity between the
elements and the human beings that suffer from them, identity which becomes a loving and understanding attitude
between these and their habitat.
In his novels Munro successfully creates an image of that world and of the conditions and work of the beings that
occupy it. Living and surviving in that world give the author his anecdotal material. This material is filled with life
experiences, of thirsts, all over which are constructed the images of men of coastal Sonora. These are images
that forge an identity that, while with its particular characteristics, communes easily with the common concerns of
humans.
Reconstructing the presence and relation of man with that environment, Munro has offered us novels that rise to
a narrative tradition whose goal is to represent sectors of reality that had remained outside the literary word. We
consider that his work continues the tradition represented by The Stories of the Desert (1959) by Emma
Dolujanoff, The Mountains and the Wind (1975) by Gerardo Cornejo, The Waxing (Increasing) (1975) by Armida de
la Vara and Well of Crisanto (1977) by Leo Sandoval, among other texts that recover and represent the conflictive
relationship of man with his space/time, and further reconstruct a particular way of understanding and living it,
both from the perspective of the narrators and through the voice of the persons.
The obstinate and obsessive need to narrate is the second distinctive mark of Munro’s novels. It is this
eagerness, one of the most valid and alive of literary work, that generates and gives life to this rich world of
representations, that is, the urgency to give textual life to that sector of reality in which the identity of the author
sinks roots and that later he seeks to share with the reader.
Therefore we cannot trace his motives and his references in a specific dialogue with the general context of the
canonic literature; we do not seek formal complexity in his novels because even when they possess it to some
degree, it is difficult for us to relate it with any particular established literary form. His individual formulation urges
thinking of the oral as his obligatory reference. Within the three works of this author we encounter as a common
denominator the echo of a genuine oral tradition. Some passages are nearly faithful transcriptions of dialogues.
In fact, if an observation be made of his texts, it is precisely that such dialogues, on occasion, try to be made
literature – perhaps at the hand of some editor – and the voices in dialogue lose the freshness of the proper turns
within their particular enunciation. The oral tradition, manifested in the aforementioned dialogues, and in the use of
the represented community’s own vocabulary, is the privileged form from which can be reconstructed the
conflicts and experiences of a community whose own history is born out of the same oral tradition, as such,
given its characteristics, lives at the margin of literary life. At the same time this privileged form is the vehicle for
the same novelistic expression. From here, for example, from the oral interview is generated the recovery of the
memory in The Voices Come from the Sea.
We can say the oral tradition is evidenced in the form in which the themes of the oral tradition are picked up and
elaborated. In the three novels, anecdotal passages are encountered proceeding from this form of expression,
as such we discover within the novelistic world the resonance of the popular voice that narrates the history of
appearances, tragic journeys, ghosts and other similar themes that always have shaped part of the non-written
literary form and pertain to the natural and ancestral manner of any community. The novels of Munro succeed in
recovering and making prevalent that popular voice whose ultimate goal is to maintain memory of the facts and
configure a community identity. From here such oral forms can be detected on the stylistic as well as the
compositional levels.
The events narrated in the novels take shape within explicit historic frameworks: the Revolution, the Cristero War,
the anti-Chinese campaign, the hounding of the yaquis, and others set the scene in which the persons act in
these novels. Here the author reinserts the people into the historic action, setting out their experiences and giving
a human vision to history, modifying the perception of historic facts so the reader can distinguish a personal
perspective of the subjects who have been objects of the historical events. Munro thus recovers a history
different from the official one and provides us with testimonial viewpoints, which enrich our perception of the
relevant facts about Mexican history.
Therefore, these novels approach more nearly the form of testimonials that has characterized the literature in
Mexico and in Latin America, and in recovering the voice of the reporter seeks to recover those values and facts
that form the base of the regional identity. To be and belong to a particular space implies identification with the
same space and with the formation of a social group, in this case the desert and the sea are geographic
dimensions from where a mode of life is learned, and with it the relationships and conflicts within which lay
passions and common concerns.
In this manner, in The Voices Come from the Sea, Munro travels the shores of distinct histories in distinct ports of
Sonora. We are witnesses to a long list of events that trace the lives of various fishermen and their families. On
the one hand we have those that have defined our country: the Revolution, religious persecution, the oppression
of the indigenous, foreign influences; on the other there are those events adhering to the interior of every person,
personal and common struggles to survive in a determined time and space, two aspects of the medium before
which the persons in this novel are confronted.
In this novel, one of the heirs of a fishermen’s saga initiates the search for a memory lost in the sea and in the
past, to clarify the mysterious death of fisherman Alejandro Palacio. He is taken to listen – and share with the
reader – the testimony of those who participate in the fishing enterprise on the coast of the state of Sonora,
during the first forty years of this century. In ports such as Guaymas, Puerto Peñasco, Puerto Lobos, Puerto
Libertad and Kino Bay; they weigh anchor to begin a journey to those anecdotes that together form a book – a
monument that the narrator prepares in honor of the fishermen “who traveled the coasts when there was nobody
there”, so that “they will not pass through this life unnoticed” (p. 179). In this way, we hear their responses to
the questions that can clarify a death and strengthen the membership in a family.
Inserted into these testimonies – compiled between 1984 and 1989 – is another journey, that initiated October 4,
1911, by the family of Melquíades Palacio and that will unite other families that live and work in Sonoran ports,
who ended up being founders of new settlements – Puerto Peñasco and Kino Bay. We are not presented with
brief fragments of these people but with following a long phase of their lives. The same history is presented to us
in two forms: the interview and the fictional recreation of the facts. Through the interviews carried out recently
the past is reconstructed in a scattered and in some ways incomplete form, but we also listen to the development
of those actions at the moment they were occurring, stories constructed from the past into the present and
culminating with the death of Alejandro Palacio. The protagonists of these two roads are the same but in different
epochs offering again two perspectives before the same fact. Precisely in this composition of history lies the
great virtue of the novel. Already reaffirmed is the introduction of the common reader to a world that can be
alien. Witnesses to the dialogue of and among persons include the reader and the author. Further, the multiple
journeys to the interior and exterior of the people are also voyages to the interior and the exterior of a time and
space determinative for the people of the social and geographic environment of the north. The border and the
desert are also traversed, elements that as the sea offer a challenge within the lives of the characters, adding an
epic character to the stories.
In a similar way, in The Sufferings of Puerto Esperanza, different stories interweave to show the daily life of a
fictitious town anchored in a specific historic time, the epoch of the Second World War.
From the perspective of Miguel, a young man who lives in the passage from childhood to youth, experiences of
life of the many people of a fishing community near the border are reconstructed. The events relevant to the
social life of a town on the coast, the fiestas of carnival, the power relationships, the initiation into sexuality, the
experiences that signify passing into adulthood, the family relationships and the conduct of prototypal persons
such as the rich, the strange or the rogue are the themes that interest the young narrator in determining who
murdered Marcos García Sangabriel, and why. The search for the truth is converted into a decisive factor in his
transformation into an adult. None of the evident tracks lead to anything. Therefore, when he discovers the truth
and succeeds in sorting out the complexity of human relationships, he leaves behind an ingenuous vision of life
and enters the world of adults.
The Devil’s Highway, offers the reader the chronicle of a journey through a most inhospitable landscape, the road
between Sonoyta and San Luis Río Colorado. The arid and unmerciful land puts to the test the capacity of man to
dominate it. Thirst is the enemy to conquer, but so also are the passions: ambition, intolerance and lust.
The novel is set out in two basic dimensions, one corresponds to the personal stories of the people in the days
before the journey, from which are derived the reasons that move them to travel toward California, and the other
relates the details of the journey. The world narrated presents unbelievable violence, from the tension that the
hostile environment provokes to the execrable nature of some of the people unable to show any solidarity, which
renders them incapable of doing any group work with the ultimate goal of crossing the desert successfully.
These persons are contrasted with those that are positively transformed through this experience, as they learn
solidarity and to be responsible, leading them to reconciliation within their own selves.
The travelers drag their personal stories out of one another and the journey converts into a form of expiation of
guilt and reconsidering of their conduct. The negation of personal identity, the racial intolerance – appearing as
the shameful Anti China campaign that flourished in Sonora in the late 1920’s and the early 1930’s -, the perverse
ambition of the ex-revolutionary bandits, the disdain of the gringos toward the Mexicans appear as themes
through the voices and actions of the different and abundant personalities. Thus appears an extremely
interesting and well-placed character, the Indian Hemeterio, of O’odham ancestry, who is in charge of guiding the
expedition even though he is running from life. This person is constructed from his personal cosmovision, his
personal doubts and the fractures in his personal identity; this serves to reshape him apart from the work he
undertakes, that is to say, guiding the expedition leads him to guide himself towards his own self-recovery.
It is thus that the voluntary narrative of Guillermo Munro traps and transports the reader through the oral history,
subjecting one to interpenetration with a reality that, although alien, is converted into one’s own through the
esthetic experience of reading.
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