Guillermo Munro and the Sculpture of the Desert
Guadalupe Beatriz Aldaco
I. The pleasure provoked by the novels of Guillermo Munro begins with the sensation, and later with the
certainty of finding ourselves before a fortunate turn to the esthetics of narrative: the esthetics of history
recounted, discussed, talked about. His novels – Voices Come from the Sea (Instituto Sonorense de Cultura,
1994), The Suffering of Puerto Esperanza (Government of the State of Sonora, National Council for Culture and
the Arts, 1996), and The Devil’s Highway (Instituto Sonorense de Cultura, 1997), reconstruct, with intense
sensitivity and mastery, the adventurous odyssey of men who wished to tame the hostile nature of
northwestern Mexico during the first half of the twentieth century, with the goal of engendering in these bleak
lands the foundations for their survival and their culture.
The novels of Munro are little related to the sometimes-grotesque spirals that hereditary plots of magic realism
draw, characterized by the obsessive invention of codes. They reconcile us, on the contrary, with the original
spirit of the novelist’s trade. They transport us into the noblest essence of the genre. In these, the narrator is
concerned with updating the fundamental literary task: to relate stories that interpenetrate with that which is
fundamentally human, this together with small and individual universes that are molding and delineating the
interior lives of persons. Woven of perceptions and ideas – at times minimally elaborated – from which they
assimilate the world and confront it. The reader enters into the universe of the actors through their individual
stories, and through the diverse roads they forge to relate with the environment and with others.
II. In Voices Come from the Sea, the founding of the ports of Sonora at the beginning of the twentieth century,
the deportation of the Yaquis, the expulsion of the Chinese, the local influence of the policies of Calles and
Obregón, religious persecution, legends such as that of Lola Casanova and the vicissitudes of the activities
foundational to the economy of the region – fishing, mining, agriculture, incarnated in the experience of the
authentic protagonists: the fisherman, the miner, the planter - are events that stimulate in the reader the variety
of uncommon reactions provoked by epic literature, in so far as they reconstruct historic and culturally original
events and strategies that are envisioned for conquering nature in these rugged territories during those times
of desolation and isolation.
As in ancient epics, in Voices Come from the Sea, the reader can follow the successes and difficulties of the
people before the obstacles and the blessings of nature and the social and political environment, always
through the conquest of an objective, of a goal, and of a geographic space that is constituted in the sphere of
resolution of a collective ideal. The results: the domination or the defeat, heroism or suffering.
The substantial dimension of the novel is rooted in the confrontation between cultures, in the crossroads of
diverse forms of facing the vicissitudes of fortune. The voices emerge in a moment of historic definition: when
the foundation of the ports of Sonora – the encounter or re-encounter between man and the sea – signified at
the same time the discovery of paradise and of hell. The discovery of new and required ways of confronting
and resolving questions of survival and, at the same time, the problem of the hostility and resistance of nature
– the desert, as much in the geographic sense as the figurative – to the intervention of the ingenuous, illusory
and at times crude and clumsy hand of the founding inhabitants.
III. The Sufferings of Puerto Esperanza is a novel of anecdotes, stories, of heroic deeds. As in The Voices
Come from the Sea, the author makes his side narrative with the inspirer’s breath of epic literature. The
passion of searching, discovering and recreating origins, the early times of a tiny community distant from
civilization; the painstaking, intense and warm look at the past reveal a profound and transcendent intention:
the recovery of the initial events that delineated the profile of the inhabitants of a town, which can be – and in
this is rooted some of the kindness of the novel – the inhabitants of whatever other lost community, that don’t
come together for real existence until it is recovered by virtue of the word. It is thus that Puerto Esperanza –
Puerto Peñasco – has achieved with this novel its full transcendence.
The Sufferings of Puerto Esperanza narrates the history of a town through the eyes of a child, and at the same
time the life history of this tiny being, marked by the experience of birth and growth in Puerto Esperanza.
Individual life and the social and geographic atmosphere are the two elements that delineate the cluster of tiny
fragments of experiences of living that are linked together.
With the death of a man – as in The Voices - under mysterious circumstances, the movement of two persons
originates, each with its own collection of anecdotes, scarred by calamities and fortune, deceptions and
hopes, frustrations and victories, carrying the burdens to the top of the hill, and the indulgences of a personal
past and the uncertainties and illusions of the future.
A special virtue of the novel is the double configuration of the narrator. On the one hand, this person, a child,
centralizes and determines the discursive and dramatic possibilities, but on the other hand, presence and
personal voice is bestowed upon a heterogeneous multitude of actors. This in turn brings about the
recuperation and re-elaboration of two universes of language: childish speech and popular slang. Parallel to
this linguistic dimension, the author achieves the design of equilibrium between two great narrative blocks that
conform to history: the experience of infancy and the evolution of a small town.
The childish game, with its components of cruelty and innocence; the imposition of the law of the strongest in
the gang as a symbol of the supremacy of the first being that all of us carry inside; the exercise of tyranny and
despotism of the greatest toward the weakest; subtleties such as the nearly perfect pleasure of a candy in the
mouth, that later is displaced by erotic dreams and even later by sexual experiences; the irreverence of the first
cigarette; the obligatory journey to the grocery store to secure the latest issues of Memín Penguín, La Familia
Burrón and Los Supermachos; the smell of refried beans and the yearning for fruit, vegetables and milk, very
scarce in the Port; and later the forced but pleasant consolation of the breast meat of sea turtle, fish, crabs, and
clams; the image of the Virgin of Guadalupe guarding the brothel bedroom on the first date; the pathetic
discovery of incest and the disquieting uncertainty of homosexuality; the fantasy of growing up and making
money in order to later purchase a car… The eyes of the reader pass through this animated and formative
series of childhood and adolescent adventures and misadventures, transmitted without the pointless
intervention of a narrator outside the language, sensibility and experience of the protagonists.
Puerto Esperanza is a port-symbol, a town-metaphor: at the boundary between land and sea, between
premodernity and paradise. Lying on a bleak upland, nearly virgin, it has the senses positioned in the
hallucinating journey of neon lights, the aroma of hamburgers, paved streets filled with colorful atmosphere
and the exquisiteness and uninhibited gringas, who can be reached by traveling a few kilometers north and
crossing the border. There, on the other side.
Puerto Esperanza is a town saturated by absences: without banks, without a church, without electricity, without
running water. It is nearly not a town. In Puerto Esperanza all is yet to be constructed, to be created, including
the same hope that dwells in its name.
The first of June, day of the mariner, they wait impatiently, as a temporary triumph over routine, the swimming
and rowing competitions, the beam, the wheel of fortune placed like an ironic monument. Also the alcohol, that
rapidly cures and disinfects the wounds inside. On whatever other day it is necessary to satisfy oneself with
going to play pool, to the movie without a roof, have a snow cone, go to the beach, to the wharf. Also one can
kill time telling jokes about the old maid, about the pious woman, about the teacher and about the candidate
for queen, or waiting with vehement curiosity the arrival of the black market. The reader can closely follow the
successes and difficulties of the heroes, in this case a boy and his friends, who are becoming passionate
detectives of a crime and who learn together to face the small good decisions and defeats, their failures and
successes.
IV. The Devil’s Highway is the narration of an epic adventure. It is the Sonoran and Mexican ordeal of the
desert. There did not exist before this within our national literature a work that did justice, full justice, to the
desert landscape of this part of the country as a protagonist of so many exploits/feats and tragedies. Munro
wanted, with this novel, to return to the Mexican desert its dimension in history. He wanted to cover, and he
succeeded, the subjective living, personal and intimate, of the sand, the sun, and the saguaros. At the same
time he patented, in print, the historic sediment of the longer term that had been derived from living together
with those high barren plains of hell, prophetic and rarely glorious.
It is the desert in the flesh, in the sweat and in the blood of the people; the desert as a majestic and infinite
presence of sky and of hell; the desert as protecting and killing cloak, like a road of life and of death, as
environment that chooses and betrays.
It is the desert also, (though official history ignores it), that engendered passages determinative in the history
of the country.
The Devil’s Highway is a novel of multiple convergences; it is, like other novels by this author, a text essentially
dialogical, in which multiple voices combine and, with them contradictory visions of the world and ways of
apprehending a common reality. The novel recreates the journey of a group of individuals through the desert,
through which we enter into the cultures of the indigenous, the mestizo, the despised Chinese, the arrogant
gringo… It is the narration of a hellish journey, in which each of these persons carries the burden of his
personal vital drama, the weight of an inheritance that returns them to their original condition of beings, cast
out by the world; beings who have to confront guilt and condemnations contracted by their anonymous
ancestors; individuals obligated to settle ancestral debts.
The novel is structured starting from two times. One is the concrete time: the duration of the plot, that
corresponds to three days of agonizing travel on the devil’s highway; the other is dense time, time
accumulated, historic time that invades the individual and intimate life of each person. This time, the grand
time, determines the other, the short, circumstantial and contingent time. The grand time is the time of the
culture lived and assimilated by each of the actors, which makes them proceed in distinct and contradictory
ways at the moment of confronting a common event.
The merit of the novel lies precisely in that the author knows how to achieve the unity between the external
dimension of the behavior of the people and the profound dimension of their actions. The most outstanding
example of this solid narrative management is the history of Hemeterio, the Pápago Indian, who is victim and
victimizer at the same time, of his ancient culture, pagan and later syncretistic, a culture that lacks sufficient
elements to maintain itself authentically and pure, that succumbs constantly before the cruelties of other
imposed and induced cultural forms.
The Devil’s Highway is a formative novel, of crude scenes, of naked and transparent images. It is, without
doubt, a cinematic novel.
V. Munro is one of those writers who know how to mislead very well. As an individual who wanders about
discretely, neither static nor a protected thinker, he knows how to hide his literary wisdom, his vocation, his
creative gift. He is not of those who like to be ostentatious in their roles. Only those of us who have read him
comprehensively, or rather, those of us who have read his work yet have known him, have the imaginary key to
move ourselves a bit closer to “the interpretation of the lesson”, that with his eyes half closed he himself and
his ancestors contributed to forge.
We know that the time in which a novel is written is not the concrete, tangible, or measurable time that the
writer employs for writing it. It is time accumulated. The good novelist is an expert in accumulated narrative.
One is the material act, objective; the other is the indispensable condition for this act to bring full realization,
and in Guillermo Munro both converge. His texts tell us that, before writing them, the author knew how to make
the lesson of the desert and the northwest sea intense and profound. He knew how to internalize the journey
and the people, and the history of the people that lived and live this journey. He has been a discreet witness
and confessor – with his personal version of the facts – of something that has taken place in these deserts.
Guadalupe Beatriz Aldaco
I. The pleasure provoked by the novels of Guillermo Munro begins with the sensation, and later with the
certainty of finding ourselves before a fortunate turn to the esthetics of narrative: the esthetics of history
recounted, discussed, talked about. His novels – Voices Come from the Sea (Instituto Sonorense de Cultura,
1994), The Suffering of Puerto Esperanza (Government of the State of Sonora, National Council for Culture and
the Arts, 1996), and The Devil’s Highway (Instituto Sonorense de Cultura, 1997), reconstruct, with intense
sensitivity and mastery, the adventurous odyssey of men who wished to tame the hostile nature of
northwestern Mexico during the first half of the twentieth century, with the goal of engendering in these bleak
lands the foundations for their survival and their culture.
The novels of Munro are little related to the sometimes-grotesque spirals that hereditary plots of magic realism
draw, characterized by the obsessive invention of codes. They reconcile us, on the contrary, with the original
spirit of the novelist’s trade. They transport us into the noblest essence of the genre. In these, the narrator is
concerned with updating the fundamental literary task: to relate stories that interpenetrate with that which is
fundamentally human, this together with small and individual universes that are molding and delineating the
interior lives of persons. Woven of perceptions and ideas – at times minimally elaborated – from which they
assimilate the world and confront it. The reader enters into the universe of the actors through their individual
stories, and through the diverse roads they forge to relate with the environment and with others.
II. In Voices Come from the Sea, the founding of the ports of Sonora at the beginning of the twentieth century,
the deportation of the Yaquis, the expulsion of the Chinese, the local influence of the policies of Calles and
Obregón, religious persecution, legends such as that of Lola Casanova and the vicissitudes of the activities
foundational to the economy of the region – fishing, mining, agriculture, incarnated in the experience of the
authentic protagonists: the fisherman, the miner, the planter - are events that stimulate in the reader the variety
of uncommon reactions provoked by epic literature, in so far as they reconstruct historic and culturally original
events and strategies that are envisioned for conquering nature in these rugged territories during those times
of desolation and isolation.
As in ancient epics, in Voices Come from the Sea, the reader can follow the successes and difficulties of the
people before the obstacles and the blessings of nature and the social and political environment, always
through the conquest of an objective, of a goal, and of a geographic space that is constituted in the sphere of
resolution of a collective ideal. The results: the domination or the defeat, heroism or suffering.
The substantial dimension of the novel is rooted in the confrontation between cultures, in the crossroads of
diverse forms of facing the vicissitudes of fortune. The voices emerge in a moment of historic definition: when
the foundation of the ports of Sonora – the encounter or re-encounter between man and the sea – signified at
the same time the discovery of paradise and of hell. The discovery of new and required ways of confronting
and resolving questions of survival and, at the same time, the problem of the hostility and resistance of nature
– the desert, as much in the geographic sense as the figurative – to the intervention of the ingenuous, illusory
and at times crude and clumsy hand of the founding inhabitants.
III. The Sufferings of Puerto Esperanza is a novel of anecdotes, stories, of heroic deeds. As in The Voices
Come from the Sea, the author makes his side narrative with the inspirer’s breath of epic literature. The
passion of searching, discovering and recreating origins, the early times of a tiny community distant from
civilization; the painstaking, intense and warm look at the past reveal a profound and transcendent intention:
the recovery of the initial events that delineated the profile of the inhabitants of a town, which can be – and in
this is rooted some of the kindness of the novel – the inhabitants of whatever other lost community, that don’t
come together for real existence until it is recovered by virtue of the word. It is thus that Puerto Esperanza –
Puerto Peñasco – has achieved with this novel its full transcendence.
The Sufferings of Puerto Esperanza narrates the history of a town through the eyes of a child, and at the same
time the life history of this tiny being, marked by the experience of birth and growth in Puerto Esperanza.
Individual life and the social and geographic atmosphere are the two elements that delineate the cluster of tiny
fragments of experiences of living that are linked together.
With the death of a man – as in The Voices - under mysterious circumstances, the movement of two persons
originates, each with its own collection of anecdotes, scarred by calamities and fortune, deceptions and
hopes, frustrations and victories, carrying the burdens to the top of the hill, and the indulgences of a personal
past and the uncertainties and illusions of the future.
A special virtue of the novel is the double configuration of the narrator. On the one hand, this person, a child,
centralizes and determines the discursive and dramatic possibilities, but on the other hand, presence and
personal voice is bestowed upon a heterogeneous multitude of actors. This in turn brings about the
recuperation and re-elaboration of two universes of language: childish speech and popular slang. Parallel to
this linguistic dimension, the author achieves the design of equilibrium between two great narrative blocks that
conform to history: the experience of infancy and the evolution of a small town.
The childish game, with its components of cruelty and innocence; the imposition of the law of the strongest in
the gang as a symbol of the supremacy of the first being that all of us carry inside; the exercise of tyranny and
despotism of the greatest toward the weakest; subtleties such as the nearly perfect pleasure of a candy in the
mouth, that later is displaced by erotic dreams and even later by sexual experiences; the irreverence of the first
cigarette; the obligatory journey to the grocery store to secure the latest issues of Memín Penguín, La Familia
Burrón and Los Supermachos; the smell of refried beans and the yearning for fruit, vegetables and milk, very
scarce in the Port; and later the forced but pleasant consolation of the breast meat of sea turtle, fish, crabs, and
clams; the image of the Virgin of Guadalupe guarding the brothel bedroom on the first date; the pathetic
discovery of incest and the disquieting uncertainty of homosexuality; the fantasy of growing up and making
money in order to later purchase a car… The eyes of the reader pass through this animated and formative
series of childhood and adolescent adventures and misadventures, transmitted without the pointless
intervention of a narrator outside the language, sensibility and experience of the protagonists.
Puerto Esperanza is a port-symbol, a town-metaphor: at the boundary between land and sea, between
premodernity and paradise. Lying on a bleak upland, nearly virgin, it has the senses positioned in the
hallucinating journey of neon lights, the aroma of hamburgers, paved streets filled with colorful atmosphere
and the exquisiteness and uninhibited gringas, who can be reached by traveling a few kilometers north and
crossing the border. There, on the other side.
Puerto Esperanza is a town saturated by absences: without banks, without a church, without electricity, without
running water. It is nearly not a town. In Puerto Esperanza all is yet to be constructed, to be created, including
the same hope that dwells in its name.
The first of June, day of the mariner, they wait impatiently, as a temporary triumph over routine, the swimming
and rowing competitions, the beam, the wheel of fortune placed like an ironic monument. Also the alcohol, that
rapidly cures and disinfects the wounds inside. On whatever other day it is necessary to satisfy oneself with
going to play pool, to the movie without a roof, have a snow cone, go to the beach, to the wharf. Also one can
kill time telling jokes about the old maid, about the pious woman, about the teacher and about the candidate
for queen, or waiting with vehement curiosity the arrival of the black market. The reader can closely follow the
successes and difficulties of the heroes, in this case a boy and his friends, who are becoming passionate
detectives of a crime and who learn together to face the small good decisions and defeats, their failures and
successes.
IV. The Devil’s Highway is the narration of an epic adventure. It is the Sonoran and Mexican ordeal of the
desert. There did not exist before this within our national literature a work that did justice, full justice, to the
desert landscape of this part of the country as a protagonist of so many exploits/feats and tragedies. Munro
wanted, with this novel, to return to the Mexican desert its dimension in history. He wanted to cover, and he
succeeded, the subjective living, personal and intimate, of the sand, the sun, and the saguaros. At the same
time he patented, in print, the historic sediment of the longer term that had been derived from living together
with those high barren plains of hell, prophetic and rarely glorious.
It is the desert in the flesh, in the sweat and in the blood of the people; the desert as a majestic and infinite
presence of sky and of hell; the desert as protecting and killing cloak, like a road of life and of death, as
environment that chooses and betrays.
It is the desert also, (though official history ignores it), that engendered passages determinative in the history
of the country.
The Devil’s Highway is a novel of multiple convergences; it is, like other novels by this author, a text essentially
dialogical, in which multiple voices combine and, with them contradictory visions of the world and ways of
apprehending a common reality. The novel recreates the journey of a group of individuals through the desert,
through which we enter into the cultures of the indigenous, the mestizo, the despised Chinese, the arrogant
gringo… It is the narration of a hellish journey, in which each of these persons carries the burden of his
personal vital drama, the weight of an inheritance that returns them to their original condition of beings, cast
out by the world; beings who have to confront guilt and condemnations contracted by their anonymous
ancestors; individuals obligated to settle ancestral debts.
The novel is structured starting from two times. One is the concrete time: the duration of the plot, that
corresponds to three days of agonizing travel on the devil’s highway; the other is dense time, time
accumulated, historic time that invades the individual and intimate life of each person. This time, the grand
time, determines the other, the short, circumstantial and contingent time. The grand time is the time of the
culture lived and assimilated by each of the actors, which makes them proceed in distinct and contradictory
ways at the moment of confronting a common event.
The merit of the novel lies precisely in that the author knows how to achieve the unity between the external
dimension of the behavior of the people and the profound dimension of their actions. The most outstanding
example of this solid narrative management is the history of Hemeterio, the Pápago Indian, who is victim and
victimizer at the same time, of his ancient culture, pagan and later syncretistic, a culture that lacks sufficient
elements to maintain itself authentically and pure, that succumbs constantly before the cruelties of other
imposed and induced cultural forms.
The Devil’s Highway is a formative novel, of crude scenes, of naked and transparent images. It is, without
doubt, a cinematic novel.
V. Munro is one of those writers who know how to mislead very well. As an individual who wanders about
discretely, neither static nor a protected thinker, he knows how to hide his literary wisdom, his vocation, his
creative gift. He is not of those who like to be ostentatious in their roles. Only those of us who have read him
comprehensively, or rather, those of us who have read his work yet have known him, have the imaginary key to
move ourselves a bit closer to “the interpretation of the lesson”, that with his eyes half closed he himself and
his ancestors contributed to forge.
We know that the time in which a novel is written is not the concrete, tangible, or measurable time that the
writer employs for writing it. It is time accumulated. The good novelist is an expert in accumulated narrative.
One is the material act, objective; the other is the indispensable condition for this act to bring full realization,
and in Guillermo Munro both converge. His texts tell us that, before writing them, the author knew how to make
the lesson of the desert and the northwest sea intense and profound. He knew how to internalize the journey
and the people, and the history of the people that lived and live this journey. He has been a discreet witness
and confessor – with his personal version of the facts – of something that has taken place in these deserts.
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