Recollections of Things to Come

Ixtepec narrates itself in the first person from the novel's opening line, a device Garro sustains for the entire book: the town is not merely a backdrop to the human plot but an entity with its own memory, grief, and complicity, watching General Francisco Rosas's federal garrison occupy it during the Cristero War of 1926 to 1929 and reporting on the occupation the way a resentful, exhausted body might report on an illness it can't shake. That choice does real structural work: individual characters, however vividly drawn, become episodes the town has lived through rather than protagonists it defers to, which lets Garro build an argument about collective memory outlasting any single person's account of events.

Isabel Moncada and Julia, General Rosas's mistress, anchor the novel's two competing models of resistance to the garrison's authority: Julia through a passive, magnetic refusal that drives Rosas half-mad with a desire he can't control, Isabel through an active, escalating defiance that culminates in her joining forces with the Cristero rebels her own family has been sheltering. Garro is careful not to rank these strategies against each other. Both women end up consumed by the same historical machine, just from opposite directions, one by withdrawing from the world the garrison has built and one by throwing herself directly into destroying it.

Garro wrote Los recuerdos del porvenir in 1950, nearly a decade before One Hundred Years of Solitude and well before the term magical realism had currency, but didn't publish it until 1963, and even then it was quickly overshadowed by the Boom writers who followed, including her own ex-husband Octavio Paz, whose critical and institutional standing dwarfed hers for most of both their lifetimes. The novel's fusion of documentary political history, the Cristero War's real persecution of Catholic communities by the postrevolutionary Mexican state, with a landscape and townspeople capable of prophecy, transformation, and collective consciousness anticipates exactly the techniques the Boom would later be credited with inventing, and Garro's belated recognition as one of its actual originators has only solidified since her death in 1998.