Notes on the so-called Northern Literature in Mexico

Abstract

This essay reflects on the recent development of what it seems to be a literary category: «Northern Literature». Recent Mexican literature has undergone a series of profound transformations. The hegemony of cultural industries has produced deep movements into the literary field. New forms of organization and dissemination of literature displaced former cultural centralization. The State, old cultural sponsor, lost its leading role among the new transnational publishers that reorganized the maps of Mexican literature under market logics. In the North, the narrative had to be centered on a few topics: borderland, drug trafficking, migration, desert, etc. This essay discusses the different expressions of this process.