Mapping Ana Clavel’s Los deseos y su sombra

• In Event: Mapping the Megalopolis: Making an Atlas of Mexico City

Abstract

In Ana Clavel’s first novel, Los deseos y su sombra (2000), the protagonist, Soledad, is searching for answers: she is invisible and can’t remember what happened to her. As she reviews her life looking for clues, she takes a journey that takes her to the National History Museum in Chapultepec, down through Paseo de la Reforma, and finally to Santo Domingo, a neighborhood north of Zócalo. In her walks and remembrances, she weaves her story with the nation’s history trying, unsuccessfully, to insert herself in the collective narrative in order to define herself as a piece of it. Looking at a map, one sees that Santo Domingo is part of the core of the downtown area, however, in the plot of the novel it is depicted as an outskirt barrio due to its peripheral setting in relation to the hegemonic National History Museum. The inversion is relevant to Soledad’s need to belong because this space provides a marginal way of looking at history, which at the end seems a better fit to the protagonist’s invisibility.
This map presentation highlights the literary depiction of city growth and its effects on social interactions, as well as the (de)formation of city/personal identity––a topic that connects with memory and remembrance artifacts, such as the statues, monuments, museums found inside Chapultepec and along Paseo de la Reforma.

Author

• Carmen Patricia Tovar, Oberlin College